Chris Fujiwara - Jerry Lewis (Contemporary Film Directors)

C O N T E M P O R A R Y
F I L M
D I R E C T O R S
Jerry Lewis
Chris Fujiwara
Jerry Lewis
Fujiwara_Jerry text.indd 1
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Contemporary Film Directors

Edited by James Naremore
The Contemporary Film Directors series provides concise,

well-written introductions to directors from around the
world and from every level of the film industry. Its chief
aims are to broaden our awareness of important artists,
to give serious critical attention to their work, and to illustrate the variety and vitality of contemporary cinema.
Contributors to the series include an array of internationally
respected critics and academics. Each volume contains
an incisive critical commentary, an informative interview
with the director, and a detailed filmography.
A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.
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Jerry Lewis
Chris Fujiwara
Universit y
of
Illin o i s
Pr e s s
U r ba n a
a nd
C h icago
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Frontispiece: The Errand Boy

2009 by Chris Fujiwara
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fujiwara, Chris.
Jerry Lewis / Chris Fujiwara.
p. cm. (Contemporary film directors)
Includes filmography.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-252-03497-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-252-07679-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Lewis, Jerry, 1926Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PN1998.3.L46825F85 2009
791.43'028'092dc22 2009026686
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To Ken-ken
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Contents
AN AMERICAN DREAM | 1
A Structural Cinema 10
The Performance of Identity 18
Saying No to No 34
Oedipus Is No Problem 44
How to Undo Things with Words 58
Lewisian Space 67
The Frame and Its Obstructions 78
Lewisian Time 86
Sound 91
The Total Filmmaker 97
An Interview with Jerry Lewis | 101
Filmography | 135
Bibliography | 147
Index | 151
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Jerry Lewis
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An American Dream
Of Jerry Lewiss beginnings as a comedian; of his fateful first encounter with Dean Martin in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1946; of the
overnight success of their nightclub act; of their rise to stardom in
films and on television; of the mounting tensions between them that
led, after sixteen films together, to their breakup in 1956; of Lewiss
smooth transition to solo stardom; and of his ascent to the status of
total filmmaker (director-producer-writer-actor) the chronicle has
been told in so many books (of which Lewiss own Dean and Me, cowritten with James Kaplan, is the best) that it is pointless to recite it
again. For the purposes of this book, I wish only to retain a sense of
the continuity of Lewiss work in all its stages. The original impulse of
his comedy, to which he has remained faithful throughout his career,
was to define his comic persona in opposition to social and cultural
values embodied by anotherusually a partner (Martin) or authority
figure. Such a structure is traditional in American comedy: star comedians have generally played characters more inept, more innocent,
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more resourceful, or more downtrodden than those around them. The

peculiarly modern tension that the structure takes on in Lewiss work
arises from two factors. The first is a profound ambivalence: the Lewis
figure may be incapable of matching the standards of the other, or he
may be in an implicit revolt against them, but the other is also what
the Lewis figure already is or may become. Second, in Lewiss work,
the encounter between the two counterparts (or two parts of the same
personality) always takes place within a context defined by the mass
media and their protocols and technologies.
Before teaming with Martin, Lewis toured the vaudeville circuit with
a record act in which he played back the recorded voices of popular
and operatic singers and accompanied them with his own exaggerated
pantomime. These performances undoubtedly not only parodied the
sentiments the songs were meant to evoke but revealed the constructed,
performed, and artificial nature of the person who was supposed to
be exteriorizing these sentiments (thereby subverting the ideology of
individuality). In these Satirical Impressions in Pantomimicry, Lewis
presented himself as a partial or composite beinga personality that
existed because of, and through a difference from, another personality
(Lewis and Kaplan 14). Foregrounding this difference exposed the fictive nature of both personalities.
The partnership with Martina handsome man and a monkey
enabled Lewis to explore this dualistic structure more anarchically and
more dialectically than in his previous solo performances. In their performances together, Martin personified the male ideal, in comparison
with which Lewis embodied various kinds of default and deviance. The
difference between them was not merely one of quantity (as if Lewiss
character merely stood lower than Martins on a scale of masculinity and
competency), nor was it a clear-cut binary opposition. As Frank Krutnik
writes, Lewis, with his perpetually shifting identities, encompasses not
simply an alternative voice to Martin but an alternative mode of being, a splintering multiplicity that contends with the handsome mans
singularity (Krutnik, Sex and Slapstick 113). I wish to explore the
relationship between these two modes of being and its structural role
in Lewiss work.
Paramount brought Martin and Lewis to Hollywood and put them
into a variety of standard comedy-team feature-film formats: service
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comedies, haunted-house comedies, Western spoofs, and so on. As

Lewis later wrote, the structures required by the conventional featurelength film made it damn near impossible for the duo to sustain the
spontaneity and the communication of their pleasure in each others
performances that made their live shows so popular: Three actsthat
structure is as old as the hills. But there are parts of the human spirit
that three acts can leave out. ... Even in the best of conditions, the joy
and wildness got freeze-dried. Between the script, the makeup, setups,
lighting, and multiple takes, the spontaneity (which was the essence
of our work) tended to wither (Lewis and Kaplan 77, 267). The Hollywood experts who guided the Martin and Lewis filmson whom
Lewis would later take satirical revenge in The Errand Boy (1961) and
The Patsy (1964)demanded only that he step in front of the camera
to make his funny faces and talk in his funny voices. Enthralled by
the apparatus and the techniques of cinema, Lewis took advantage of
his stardom to learn about all aspects of filmmaking on the sets of his
films and on the Paramount lot. (Lewis traces this fascination back to
his wartime stint as an usher at the Paramount Theater in New York,
when he saw studio promotional films that showed the stars on the
lot, the sound stages, the art department, the camera department, the
wardrobe and makeup departments, the stars dressing rooms, the commissary, andmost fascinating to methe editing room [Lewis and
Kaplan 76].) On his days off from Paramount, he recruited friends to
work with him on his amateur sixteen-millimeter films.
From the start, Lewis took an active part in shaping his films with
Martin: on their first film, George Marshalls My Friend Irma (1949), he
reworked the story (based on a well-known radio comedy series) with
the writer, Cy Howard, to make room for a new character, to be played
by Lewis (Lewis and Kaplan 85). Lewis collaborated on the scripts of
several films, such as Hal Walkers Thats My Boy (1951), without credit,
and made suggestions on staging and camera coverage to the directors. He received a special credit for staging special material in song
numbers in Marshalls Money from Home (1953). For an explanation
of Lewiss claim to have codirected several of the Martin and Lewis
filmsincluding Norman Taurogs Living It Up (1954)the reader
should consult my interview with him in this volume. Despite Lewiss
input and his increasing artistic ambitions, he constantly found himself
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frustrated by the producer Hal Walliss insistence on sticking with established formulas. If you want to know what kept us from blossoming
and finding our highest comic potential onscreen, Lewis wrote, I can
tell you the answer in two words: Hal Wallis (Lewis and Kaplan 157).
Though the Martin and Lewis films fail to give an adequate documentation of the partnership, even the most mediocre of them contains
thematic elements or bits of material that Lewis would develop in his
solo films. The best Martin and Lewis films, Artists and Models (1955)
and Hollywood or Bust (1956), were made by their best director, Frank
Tashlin, whom Lewis acknowledged as his mentor (and who made a
strategic decision to let [Lewis] in on the technical aspects of filmmaking [Lewis and Kaplan 23233]): the two films clearly belong more
to Tashlins thematic and stylistic universe than to Lewiss (though it
is more difficult to say the same of the later films in which Tashlin
directed Lewis).
After the breakup of the team in 1956 (prior to the release of Hollywood or Bust, their final film together), Lewis produced, for Paramount,
his first film without Martin, The Delicate Delinquent (directed and written by Don McGuire), filmed in 1956 and released in 1957. For the next
three years, Lewis alternated between starring in potboilers produced
by his nemesis, Hal Wallis, and directed by George Marshall (The Sad
Sack, 1957) or Norman Taurog (Dont Give Up the Ship, 1959; and Visit
to a Small Planet, 1959, loosely adapted from but not much elevated by
its connection with Gore Vidals hit Broadway play) and starring in his
own superior productions under Tashlins direction: Rock-a-Bye Baby,
The Geisha Boy (both 1958), and Cinderfella (1960). The last of these
was a pivotal film for Lewis in its presentation of the metamorphosis
of the put-upon, incompetent Fella (a typical rendition by Lewis of
the figure he had come to call the Idiot) into a suave and masterful
princea metamorphosis whose profound resonances with his own
career Lewis would continue to explore in his subsequent work.
In 1960, before the release of Cinderfella, Lewis wrote, directed,
produced, and starred in The Bellboy, the first film on which he received credit as director. The Bellboy represented a risk for Lewis and
Paramount: the title character, Stanley (Lewis), does not speak until the
end, and the film has no plot, depicting an unconnected series of the
heros misadventures at and around the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami,
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where the film was largely shot. The studios trepidation over the films
plotlessness is reflected in the prologue, in which the fictional Paramount
executive Jack Emulsion [Jack Kruschen] gamely tries to explain the
unusual nature of the film. Partly funding the film himself, Lewis shot
it on a fast schedule and in black-and-white (at that time, still a commercial option for Jerry Lewis comedies: The Delicate Delinquent, The
Sad Sack, Dont Give Up the Ship, and Visit to a Small Planet were all
in black-and-white, as would be The Errand Boy and Its Only Money).
This original, experimental film was a great success.
Over the next five years, Lewis directed five more films for Paramount. For The Ladies Man (1961), he built a vast set (occupying two
Paramount soundstages) to represent the Hollywood boarding house
for aspiring actresses at which the woman-fearing Herbert (Lewis) gets
a job as a houseboy. Lewiss exuberant mise-en-scne of this incredible
set, in color, shows his expanding directorial confidence and ambition
(see fig. 1).
In The Errand Boy, Lewis satirizes Hollywood filmmaking, casting
himself as Morty Tashman (in an homage to his cinematic mentor, Frank
Tashlin), a poster-hanger who is recruited as a studio spy and, after a
series of mishaps, is made a star. Like The Ladies Man and The Bellboy,
The Errand Boy is structured as a loose succession of gags. The Nutty
Figure 1. The introduction of the

dollhouse set in The Ladies Man.
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Professor (1963), the one Lewis film that has attained something like
classic status among mainstream American critics and film historians,
presents a more solid narrative. In this takeoff on Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, the Jekyll figure, Dr. Julius Kelp, is a clumsy, shy chemistry professor with buck teeth, thick glasses, and a frog voice; the Hyde into whom
he transforms himself, Buddy Love, is a slick, vain, boorish lounge lizard.
The Patsy (1964), another show-business satire, focuses on the business
of manufacturing celebrity, with Lewis as the bellboy Stanley Belt, who
is discovered and made into a star by the staff of a recently deceased
comedian. In The Family Jewels (1965), Lewis plays seven roles; six
are the uncles of the nine-year-old heiress Donna Peyton (Donna Butterworth), who, under the terms of her late fathers will, must choose
her new guardian from among them: a boat captain, a circus clown, a
photographer, an airline pilot, a detective, and a gangster. The seventh
role is the family chauffeur, Willard, whom Donna resolutely prefers.
During the same period in which he made these masterpieces, Lewis also starred in three films produced by his production company but
directed by Tashlinthe entertaining Its Only Money (1962), the savage
Whos Minding the Store? (1963), and the delirious Disorderly Orderly
(1964)and, reluctantly, one last film for Wallis, Boeing Boeing (dir.
John Rich, 1965), with which Lewis ended his long Paramount tenure.
All these films were reviewed more or less indistinguishably by American
film critics (except that since Boeing Boeing, the only insignificant film
among them, is a straight farce rather than slapstick comedy, Lewis, cast
in a supporting role behind Tony Curtis, received praise for his restraint).
On the other hand, a number of French critics, including writers for
the two leading film magazines, Cahiers du cinma and Positif, heralded
Lewis as an original and important filmmaker. (The two magazines had
already championed Tashlin in the 1950s.) The most tireless of Lewiss
French supporters, the Positif and France-Observateur critic Robert
Benayoun, would publish a major book on Lewis, Bonjour Monsieur
Lewis, in 1972, by which time three other books had already appeared
in French: Jean-Louis Leutrat and Paul Simoncis Jerry Lewis (1964),
Nol Simsolos Le monde de Jerry Lewis (1969), and Grard Recacenss
Jerry Lewis (1970). The enthusiasm of French intellectuals (shared by
the general public) for Lewis has given rise, in the United States, to
countless lazy and patronizing jokes at his expense and at that of France
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from unthinking, conformist punditsgibes whose ideological nature

has become unmistakable and more obnoxious than ever in a period of
U.S. history that has witnessed the rebranding of Freedom Fries.
Lewiss departure from Paramount in 1965 marked a drastic change
in his fortunes as a director and star. He found a temporary home at
Columbia, for which he directed Three on a Couch (1966), from a script
by Sam Taylor that was not written for him. Attempting to modify his
image, Lewis cast himself as Chris Pride, a successful artist who is offered a commission that includes an extended stay in Paris. When his
psychiatrist fiance, Elizabeth (Janet Leigh), declines to accompany
him out of concern for three female patients who have an aversion to
men, Chris undertakes to cure the three women by befriending them
under different disguises. The strain of working against a conventional
and limiting structure is apparent throughout the early scenes (Lewis
said, It was a challenge for me and I had to work terribly hard to adjust
myself to the comedian. I needed a long time, two and a half reels, before
I could let him loose [Benayoun 180]),1 but Lewiss triumph over the
script becomes total with the first sequence in which Chris appears in
the guise of the rodeo king Ringo Raintree.
In his next film for Columbia, The Big Mouth (1967), Lewis plays
an accountant named Gerald Clamson, who, while on vacation in San
Diego, becomes the target of criminals through his resemblance to gangster Sid Valentine, who has apparently been killed after absconding with
some diamonds. Though based on a routine premise, The Big Mouth
reaffirms Lewiss commitment to the absurd and his independence from
Hollywood norms of narrative and characterization. Lewis reined himself
in to star in Way ... Way Out (dir. Gordon Douglas, 1966) for Twentieth CenturyFox and in Dont Raise the Bridge, Lower the River (dir.
Jerry Paris, 1968) and Hook, Line, and Sinker (dir. George Marshall,
1969) for Columbia. The last of these three is by far the best, because
of Lewiss obvious (though uncredited) participation as codirector (he
also produced the film). In Hook, Line, and Sinker, Lewiss character,
after going on a spending spree beyond his means when his physician
tells him he has only a short time to live, decides to fake his own death
to avoid paying the credit-card bills. The grimness of the plot is symptomatic of the darkening of Lewiss tone and concerns at the end of the
sixties and the beginning of the seventies.
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In 1970, he made, for United Artists, the only feature film he directed
in which he did not star, One More Time, a sequel to Richard Donners
Salt and Pepper (1968), with the stars (Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis
Jr.) of the earlier film re-creating their roles of the London nightclub
owners Chris Pepper (Lawford) and Charlie Salt (Davis). In One More
Time, the impecunious Chris feigns his own death while assuming the
identity of his wealthy, titled identical-twin brother, who has been mysteriously murdered. Next, Lewis directed Which Way to the Front? (1970),
in which he stars as Brendan Byers, a multimillionaire who, after being
drafted but excused from service as 4-F (the film is set in 1943), forms
a small private army with three other rejects and sets off with them to
Europe, where he impersonates the German field marshal Kesselring, a
confidant of Hitler (Sidney Miller). Warner Bros., the distributor, buried
the film on its U.S. release, and its commercial failure brought an end to
the twenty-one-year period during which Lewis was regularly on movie
screens and to the ten-year period in which he flourished as a director. His
attempt at an independent production, The Day the Clown Cried, which
he directed in Europe in 1972, with himself in the lead role of a clown in
Nazi Germany who is ordered to accompany a convoy of children to the
gas chambers, ran into difficulties, including the failure of the producer,
Nat Wachsberger, to meet his financial commitments. Lewis completed
filming by investing his own money, but postproduction was never finished,
and because of legal complications the film has not been released.
If the perception that his work as a director was peripheral to, or
dependent on, his acting persona contributed to Lewiss failure to sustain
his directing career after his eclipse as a film star, larger historical factors
also played a part. The institution of Hollywood cinema as a purveyor
of mass entertainment had made Lewis a star and nurtured his career.
Throughout the 1960s, Lewis remained bound to that institution, even
as he created a personal filmmaking system and style that were radically
different from, and often critical of, the norms of commercial cinema.
By appearing in films like Boeing Boeing and Way ... Way Outat
once bloated and threadbareand the routine Dont Raise the Bridge,
Lower the River, Lewis linked himself to the inescapable general perception of a declined and culturally irrelevant Hollywood. Meanwhile,
at least in the United States, no context existed for the appreciation of
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the originality of Lewiss directorial work. As a result, at a time when

Hollywood was desperately trying to reinvent itself, Lewis had become
identified with an obsolete entertainment regime.
Whether he appeared in his own films or not, Lewiss directorial style
was too drastic, uncompromising, and strong for even a self-reinventing
Hollywood. His one feature film in which he did not star, One More
Time, although representative of Lewiss directorial style and concerns,
was not a very good advertisement for his potential as a popular filmmaker capable of negotiating the cultural shifts of the period. Its not
merely that the former Rat Packers Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford
represent a retrograde, Establishment mode of entertainment. Perhaps
the film needed to be purified of its plot (which, though vestigial, still
remains prominent) and pushed in the direction of a pure interplay
between the stars, as in John Cassavetess Husbandsto name a film
that Lewis didnt like, though he considered its director an exceptional
film-maker on the strength of Shadows, Too Late Blues, and Faces
(Lewis, Total Film-Maker 164). One More Time is a diagram of a film,
a sketch of possibilities that were to remain unfulfilled, a marker for
Lewiss silence as a filmmaker during the 1970s.
Lewis did not return to films until 1980. His comeback vehicle,
Hardly Working, which he directed in Florida for the independent
producers Igo Kantor and James J. McNamara, and in which he starred
as Bo Hooper, an out-of-work circus clown, was released to considerable box-office success in Europe and (the following year) in the United
States. His next film, Smorgasbord (1983), was sabotaged by its distributor, Warner Bros., which didnt bother to release the film theatrically in
the United States, letting it emerge on TV and home video under the
title Cracking Up. Lewis plays the disaster-prone Warren Nefron, who,
when his attempts at suicide fail, seeks respite in psychiatric therapy.
In addition to the Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon, which
he has hosted every Labor Day since 1966, Lewis has remained in the
public eye through appearances on television, live performances, and
occasional film roles (most notably in Martin Scorseses The King of
Comedy [1983] and Emir Kusturicas Arizona Dream [1993]). As a film
director, he has been, sadly, inactive since Boy, his short contribution
to the 1990 omnibus How Are the Kids? / Comment vont les enfants?
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A Structural Cinema
As may be evident from this brief survey, Lewiss cinema is independent
from plot to a degree unusual in commercial cinema. The gag orientation
of Lewiss work accounts partly for this independence, while also linking his work to a tradition of American film comedy in which situations
and routines featuring a star comedian (or team) take precedence over
an overarching narrative. In the second half of the twentieth century,
Lewis is the great heir to this tradition, whose modern aspects his work
highlights and extends. In his films, the gagor, more generally, the
moment, scene, episode, event, or blockdistracts from and disconnects the plot. What at first looks like a plot turns out to be a line that is
followed only to be snapped off after it intersects another line, as in the
opening sequence of The Family Jewels, which (using a style reminiscent
of a traditional crime film) follows an armored-car heist up to the point
when it is foiled by the oblivious Willard while he is playing outfield
in a kids softball game. Throughout this exploit, Willard is unaware of
the plot that he is intruding on and demolishing. The sequence is emblematic of Lewis characters disruptive function in relation to plot, as
is the scene near the end of the film in which Willard disorganizes the
band of parade marchers that he commandeers in an attempt to save
the kidnapped Donna (see fig. 2).
Like all narratives, the Lewisian narrative, however thwarted or vestigial it may be, poses and answers a question. But in Lewiss work, the
question becomes forgotten or displaced. In The Ladies Man, the master
questionCan Herbert get over his problem with women?is simply
dismissed, as Herbert finds himself in a house surrounded by women
who overcome his reluctance and persuade him to stay. From this point
ondespite token references to the initial psychological configuration, as
Herbert attempts periodically to leave the housethe film is free to be
about something else, or a succession of something elses. The Ladies Man
becomes an elaborate, astonishing mise-en-scne of encounters, frightening, harassing, or pleasant, with the women of the house, as Herbert tries
out a variety of roles: surrogate child for the housekeeper, Katie (Kathleen
Freeman); mailman for the girls in a long sequence; prey to Miss Cartilage
(Sylvia Lewis), the mysterious denizen of a forbidden room into which
Herbert, at length, ventures; put-upon rehearsal partner for the aspiring
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Figure 2. The disorganized marchers

in The Family Jewels.
actresses; performer in a revue staged for a TV show; and even teacher

and mentor to Fay (Pat Stanley), the depressive ugly duckling among the
glamorous boarders. The playing of these multiple roles appears to be an
exercise that Lewis/Herbert indulges in for its own sakethat is, simply
as play rather than as some program of self-healing in an effort to resolve
the initial problem.
The studio executives in The Errand Boy wish to find out why Paramutual Studios is losing money, but it is not clear that their goal is communicated to Morty (from whom they nonetheless expect information on
the subject). Late in the film, in his magical conversation with Magnolia, an
ostrich puppet that speaks in the voice of a southern belle, Morty mentions
vaguely that he has been unsuccessful in finding the desired information,
a project to which he never appears to devote any time or effort. As in
The Ladies Man, the apparent premise of the plot proves unreliable as
an instruction for viewing the film; the premise is an order that the Lewis
character does not follow. To frustrate expectations further, The Ladies
Man and The Errand Boy hint at, only to break off, the development of a
romantic couple (between Herbert and Fay in the former andhowever
unlikelybetween Morty and Magnolia in the latter).
Even when they have relatively strong plots, Lewiss films subvert or
refuse the traditional role of the plot in organizing events. In The Family
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Jewels, after establishing a central questionWhich uncle will Donna

choose as her guardian?that allows the film to take an episodic form,
Lewis lets the final episode (involving the gangster Uncle Bugsy) expand
to fill the available narrative space, though its own narrative impetus
serves only as a pretext for a series of non sequiturs and independent
gags (the detective Skylocks unexpected triumph over a pool hustler
[Robert Strauss] in a waterfront poolroom; Bugsy and Donna whiling
away time in his hideout; Willard leading the marchers). In The Patsy
(whose central questionCan Stanley become a star?is answered in
advance by the mere fact that he is played by Lewis), the duration of
such scenes as Stanleys stand-up performance at the Copa Caf drains
them of narrative purpose and causality, installing instead a logic of the
situation, moment, or event. The idea of the goal is always criticized
and diverted. In Three on a Couch, the stated objectiveto cure the
three patientsproves wholly inadequate as an explanation or justification for the zaniness that transpires (just as in Mario Bavas Sei donne
per lassassino [1964], the explicit motive for the murders of a group of
models is absurdly incommensurate with their atrocity).
Throughout the vertiginous disorder of The Big Mouth, the periodic
appearances of the onscreen narrator (Frank DeVol)who from the
waist up appears to be wearing normal business attire but turns out to
be wearing no pantsridicule his own assertion that a true story is being
narrated. Not only is it incredible that the story is true, but it can even
be doubted that what happens in the film is truly a story. Though Lewis
hints that the problem of the narrative should be seen in broader terms
as one of communication, his treatment of the theme undermines such
a perspective. At his initial seaside encounter with his double, Valentine,
Clamson repeatedly tries to run away before Valentine has finished explaining the location of the stolen diamonds. Later, Clamsons frustrations with a phone operator keep him from calling the police, and when
they materialize anyway on a highway, the officers prove less interested
in hearing his story than in arguing among themselves about the code
number of the infraction for which he is to be written up. My problem,
he says, trying to explain it to the sympathetic Suzie (Susan Bay) as if it
were a chronic condition he carries with him. In the final scene, when
the two reach the place (the sea) where, as he says, it all started, Suzie
says to Clamson: You mean the problem. The thing youve been trying
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Jerry Lewis
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to tell me. The thing thats kept us running until theres no place to run
any more. And chased by half the population. Jerry, Im listening. What
has to be communicated is finally dismissed (the last line in the film:
It wasnt important). Posed in the most generalindeed, universal
terms, Clamsons problem is a formality, a MacGuffin, something to
justify a one-hundred-minute film. All the problems in Lewiss films are
like this. He insists on highlighting the fictive, ceremonial, obligatory
nature of problems and then lets them disappear from the film. It is a
way of saying that the problem is a pretext, a symptom.
Lewis ignores the initial premises of Hardly Working and Cracking
Up at will; by a certain point, it becomes hard to tell what each of these
remarkable late works is supposed to be about. After a first half that
consists mainly of Bo taking on a series of jobs, the second half of Hardly
Working, in which he gets hired at the post office and gradually masters
his function, unrolls amid mounting ambiguity and disorder. Emphasis
is placed, briefly, on the misunderstanding by two of Bos superiors at
the post office, Balling (Alex Henteloff) and Frank (Harold J. Stone),
that Bo has influential friends who have helped him get the job; in fact,
Bos waspish brother-in-law (Roger C. Carmel) called in a favor to get
Bo out of the house. The misunderstanding leads nowhere and remains
a mysteriously unresolved sidetrack in the plot, symptomatic of a general
sense that the film has a secret concern that it refuses to address openly
but that surfaces, for example, in Bos strong negative reaction when his
coworker Steve (Steve Franken) calls him a clown. Has Bo rejected,
falsely, his past as a clown, and is the film concerned with his eventual
acceptance of his true path? Or is the word clown still sacred for Bo,
and does he object to its utterance in the profane confines of the post
office? It is clear only that Bos decision to put on his clown makeup and
suit on his last delivery run is as much a reintegration as a defiance: Bo
is returning to his true calling.2
Cracking Up begins by setting up the situation of the misfit Warren
Nefron entering therapy with a psychiatrist, Jonas Pletchick (Herb Edelman), in the hope of freeing himself from his vaguely defined disorder.
Warrens therapy sessions (with which the film intersperses episodes
that are either related by Warren to his doctor or in which he takes
part outside therapy) form the main line in a plot that is loose even by
Lewiss standards, since the central character of an episode might be
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Warrens father, a French ancestor, another doctor whom Warren meets

by chance, or a country sheriff whose car passes Warrens on the road
(all figures played by Lewis). The organizing principle of the narrative
proves to be Lewiss presence as actor and its propensity for triggering
destruction, confusion, and chaos.
Like Warrens French ancestor, who concocts an elaborate plan to escape from prison, the characters Lewis plays in all his films are in a state
of flight. This condition is so basic to their existence that it doesnt matter
if the flight is carried out by another (in the Frenchmans case, a cloth
dummy). The possibility for flight to be communicated and delegated
to another is more fundamental in Lewiss cinema than the identity of
the person who carries it out. Lewisian flight is always implicitly a flight
from something, even when its posed as a flight toward something. In
The Big Mouth, its both: Clamson is in flight from the crooks and in
search of the diamonds. In Which Way to the Front?, Byers, fleeing
from the dread word rejection, embarks on a mission that takes him
into the stronghold of the Nazi high command.
The Lewis character in his later films is destined to be followed by
those who adore him (Bo delivering the mail in clown makeup and costume in Hardly Workingan action that resonates with the unseen The
Day the Clown Cried) and for whom he is a leader, a model, a liberation
(as he is for the clientele of the Purple Pit in The Nutty Professor), or
chased by those who want to kill him (The Big Mouth) because his very
existence is an intolerable violation, because he has crossed a line and
committed some unspeakable treason against humanity. Which Way to
the Front? also poses the Lewis character in relation to mass movements
and militarization. Rejected as 4-F (as was Lewis in real life) and cast
out of the American military mass movement, Byers develops his own
movement from which he proceeds to imitate and subvert the German
military mass movement.
In The Bellboy, a truculent customer traces a line across the floor of the
hotel lobby with Stanleys body by dragging it across the floor and down
the stairs. In The Nutty Professor and The Big Mouth, shots of footprints
render the passages of bodies through space in diagrammatic fashion.
Sometimes the human trajectory in Lewis violates the laws of gravity and
human limitations; sometimes it breaks off and turns back on itself, like
the narrative trajectories of The Errand Boy and The Patsycircular films
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that take us, at the end, to the place and the action of their beginnings.
The same is true of The Big Mouth, with the return to the ocean.
A typical trajectory in Lewiss cinema is a running to and fro, a startingoff in one direction only to turn back confusedly, what Maurice Blanchot
calls a dis-cursusa broken, interrupted course that ... imposes the
idea of the fragment as a form of coherence (Infinite Conversation 4).
Discursus, in Latin, comes from discurrere, which literally means
to run to and fro (the dis- is separative, according to Eric Partridge
[125])and this is what Lewis does in his films (as in the shot in The
Ladies Man of several Herberts fleeing up multiple sets of stairs). In The
Big Mouth, the hotel manager (Del Moore) describes his mysterious
persecutor as a road runner. At the end of Cracking Up, the psychiatrist shows that he has inherited his patients strange disorder by running
around ineffectually in various directions in the middle of a street where
he has inadvertently caused a car accident. His broken and scattered
movements recall those of the parade marchers under the direction of
Willard in The Family Jewels. The prevalence of such movements in
Lewiss cinema indicates that if modernity is defined as a condition of
interruption, Lewiss is an exemplary modern cinema.
In his interview with me, Lewis said, of a scene in The Family Jewels,
Im coming from something to that, and from that going to something. So
I always did everything as an arc. I never did this without hanging here and
groping there. Any good director that has any quality or any competency
at all does not work on the one setup. Hes coming from where he was
and groping to where hes going, in order for that to work right. This kind
of emotional pulse, which is indeed powerful in Lewiss films, has little
in common with the seamless flow associated with Hollywood narrative
cinema. He constructs his films as sets of boxes or building blocksthe
fragment as a form of coherence, in Blanchots phraseinside which
the hanging here and groping there take place. As Lewis recognizes, his
directorial style promotes a certain incongruity that leads to laughter:
I think and deal in visual terms, as Chaplin did, though I am not placing
myself in his company. The benefits of thinking comedy in visual terms,
as opposed to verbal terms, opens [sic] the door to incongruity and then
to laughter (Lewis, Total Film-Maker 182).
The block structure of Lewiss narratives is mirrored in his sets,
which are assemblies of adjoining compartments. The most elaborate of
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these spaces is the enormous dollhouse set, with its absent fourth wall,
in The Ladies Man. This famous construction pushes to an extreme a
principle of Lewiss work with cinematic space: to make the borders
between areas visible, letting the audience perceive the constructed
nature of the space. A shot of the multitude of women coming downstairs for breakfast in the magisterial morning sequence in The Ladies
Man first discloses the dollhouse nature of the set, with a composition
that shows the cafeteria as a large enclosed space at screen right, the
hall in depth, and the stairs in a narrow enclosed space at left. A few
moments later, Herberts descent down the stairs occasions a still more
extreme statement of the scale and complexity of the set, as the camera
cranes back to show almost the whole of the house. Throughout the
film, Lewis uses the set simultaneously to make visible and to glide over
with his camera the divisions between rooms and corridors. He does
the same thing at the end of the prom sequence in The Nutty Professor, when, after Kelp addresses the audience and shambles offstage, a
lateral tracking shot finds him alone backstage.
Like any competent director, Lewis is also capable of linking one
block to another (in The Errand Boy, Morty, turning a corner to knock
over a group of men in armor, is still carrying his basketball from the
preceding episode) or of filling in the spaces between blocks to present
a surface of naturalism. The Nutty Professor is the most seamless of
Lewiss films, followed (also chronologically) by The Patsy, The Family
Jewels, and Three on a Couch. Nevertheless, all these films have unusually consequential gaps, and the more one knows Lewiss work, the
more important the gaps become, and the less meaningful seem his few
concessions to the conventional requirement that they be filled.
In films such as The Bellboy, The Errand Boy, and Cracking Up,
such concessions disappear altogether. Serge Daney writes of Which
Way to the Front? that not only does Lewis seem no longer to worry
about the articulations of his narrative, ... but its the very principle of all
diegesis that he seems to leave up to chance, the question: how (by what
right) to pass from one thing to another? (61). In discarding the surface
logic of narrative and verisimilitude, Lewiss cinema foregrounds its own
structural logic. The viewer of a Lewis film follows the unfolding and
application of the rules of construction that belong to the filmrules that
are independent of the demands of narrative. This is Lewiss formalist,
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materialist side. A sequence in The Bellboy merely stages, in succession, all four possible permutations of dual roles played by Milton Berle
and Jerry Lewis: Lewis-as-Stanley/Berle-as-himself, Berle-as-himself/
Lewis-as-himself, Lewis-as-himself/Berle-as-bellboy, Lewis-as-Stanley/
Berle-as-bellboy. Its like the working out of a mathematical problem on
a blackboard (see fig. 3). This is the kind of formal problem that increasingly concerns Lewis: for example, the problem of how to tell a joke, how
to formalize and arrange it. Lewis writes in The Total Film-Maker, In
my case there are thirty ways to show a jokeinsert it, cut to it, refer to
it, punch it, lay back, double-cut! But why, and how? (128).
The block is not a part through which the themes of the whole
continue to move, receiving a development that is only relatively independent of the whole. The block is a collision of bodies and the spacetime that contains them, a set of poses or actions (hanging here and
groping there) that are present with each other but that remain apart
instead of complementing or embracing each other. In The Ladies
Man, while Katie, with whom he has crossed paths by chance, rattles
on in praise of his work (You are just living proof that good people
are good things to be), Herbert, oblivious, recites the instructions
he has just received from the visiting Gainsborough (Buddy Lester).
The meeting of Herbert and Katie will have been a nonmeeting: they
Figure 3. The Bellboy: Jerry Lewis as

Jerry Lewis, Milton Berle as a bellboy.
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share the same space, as defined by Lewiss mise-en-scne; nothing

passes between them; they separate.
Because it is only a single unit, without hierarchies, the block frees
the isolatedness of the gestures or actions it contains and lets them exist
for themselves, without subordinating them to a narrative logic. In the
Miss Cartilage sequence of The Ladies Man, Herberts action exists next
to Miss Cartilages action and next to the action of Harry James and his
orchestra, who are magically present in Miss Cartilages vast suite. The
juxtaposition of these actions constitutes a single block. The dance scene
in Three on a Couch is a block of back-and-forth lateral movement, set
to music, a single drifting-out and -back.
The block tendency in Lewiss work reaches its full development in
The Family Jewels: the episode and the anecdote for themselves predominate over the plot; or rather, the plot merely justifies the episodes.
Since each block has a different main character, the discontinuity of the
film is greater than usual with Lewis. What matters most is movement
for its own sake as a formal requirement of the film. Another formal
requirement is met by Willard summoning all the uncles at Donnas moment of crisisalthough they fail to arrive and are of no help in rescuing
her. The chance convergence of Willard, the marchers, and Skylock and
Matson (Sebastian Cabot) at Bugsys waterfront hideout represents not
so much a surrealist vindication of chance as the completion of a filmic
structure that is called into play by no other power than the sheer love
of watching lines converge.
The Performance of Identity
Not only scenes but people, too, can be blocks. In Three on a Couch,
each of the three target women is a block of preferences and weaknesses
to which Chris adapts himself to become the male ideal. In Which Way
to the Front?, Kesselring is a block of traits that Byers tries to imitate.
In Hardly Working, each of Bos jobs is a block of challenges in dealing
with the physical universe.
This mode of characterization represents Lewiss rebellion against
the structures of the American feature-length film. In the Martin and
Lewis films and in his early solo efforts, Lewiss characters, though freakish in their behavior and socially inadequate, stay reined in by conven18
Jerry Lewis
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tional narratives that focus on their relationships with the characters

played by Martin, fathers or father figures (such as Eddie Mayehoffs
dominating exfootball star in Thats My Boy), women as love interests,
and children. However aggressively his performance pushes against the
narrative frames, Lewiss characters function in their service.
Stanley in The Bellboy has no responsibilities to such a structure,
and this liberation, reflected in the films episodic construction, deeply
affects the conception of the character. Stanley has no past (compare the
flashback sequences that detail the Lewis characters back story in, for
example, Taurogs The Caddy [1953]). He has no goals other than the
immediate ones defined by the tasks he is assigned. He has no close male
friend, no female love object, no parental figures (except, perhaps, the
hotel manager [Alex Gerry], but their interactions are insignificant until
the final scene). Nothing defines Stanley except his functioning in small,
discrete, bounded situations in which his relationships are usually with
objects (the engine he removes from the Volkswagen, the pair of pants he
presses too thoroughly, the elevator that doesnt come, the chairs he sets
up in the ballroom, the airplane he borrows). Stanley exists completely
within the separate blocks of the film.
The comic performer, in Lewiss view, forms an erratic pattern
that encompasses characters who are, in fact, different. Lewis explains:
Chaplin was both the shlemiel and the shlimazel. He was the guy who
spilled the drinksthe shlemieland the guy who had the drinks spilled
on himthe shlimazel. In his shadings of comedy, and they were like
a rainbow, he also played a combination of shlemiel-shlimazel. ... My
Idiot character plays both the shlemiel and the shlimazel, at times the
inter-mix. Im always conscious of the three factorsdone to, doing to
self, and doing to someone else by accident or designwhile playing
him, but they are not in acute focus. They swim in and out at any given
moment (Lewis, Total Film-Maker 198). The Lewisian person is not
merely inconsistent, he is discontinuous. In The Ladies Man, Herbert in
the highchair as Katie feeds him is self-assertive and aggressive, unlike
in other scenes. In the restaurant where he takes Ellen (Ina Balin) in
The Patsy, the gentle and inept Stanley Belt, put on the defensive when
the headwaiter (Fritz Feld) kisses Ellens hand, suddenly breaks into
Buddy Love voice and attitude. Stanleys parody of social niceness at
the cocktail party, letting loose with an unexpected show-biz sweetie,
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implies a consciousness of modes of speech that the character has not

previously demonstrated and that his characterization does not account
for. At the end of The Errand Boy, Morty suddenly acquires a new vocal timbre and a new vocabulary (Love ya). In Three on a Couch, the
seemingly involuntary verbal reactions elicited from Chris when a line
of female models files past him in a clothing store involve a mixing of
voices explicable neither in terms of Chriss psychology nor in terms of
his attempt to make his Ringo Raintree disguise plausible, as he slips
out of his Western accent into other Lewisian vocal mannerisms.
Lewis as director doesnt thematize these changes or recuperate
them within the kind of structure that declares that the apparent inconsistencies are intended as a complex characterization and that they
will be (and therefore already are in advance) resolved somehow. Lewis refuses to resolve. An apparent exception is the end of The Nutty
Professor, which implies the possibility for Kelp and Love to become
synthesized. But synthesis never occurs: there is nothing but conflict and
reversal (this is clearer at the end of The Errand Boy, in which Morty
and his double confront each other: they shake hands and are in some
sense united, but they remain two different people).
In the Magnolia scene in The Errand Boy, Morty suddenly becomes
able to give a naturalistic, psychological explanation for his constant
screwing up: Its just that Ive been so delighted with working here that
I didnt think half of the time. In The Big Mouth, the narrator speculates
on Clamsons motives in trying to get into the Hilton Inn and comes
up with three possibilities: the diamonds, frustration at not being able
to get anybody to listen to him, and interest in Suzie. In both films, the
explanation is merely a hypothesis, an optional way of understanding
the character. This is also true in The Nutty Professor: the hypothesis
that would explain the behavior of Love, and that of Kelp, merely exists
in the ideational space of the narrative; it doesnt resolve the mysteries
of the film.
In Lewiss films, the separate blocks of identity that constitute his
characters are unified, if at all, only by Lewis himself: as a body, as a
famous star, as a complex image. Chaplin said, in response to critics of his
camera style, I dont need interesting camera angles. I am interesting.
Though his own work with the camera is often spectacularly interesting, Lewis could say the same: he makes himself the justification, the
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substance of the film. (There are exceptions, especially One More Time,
in which Lewis does not appear, and The Big Mouth and Which Way to
the Front?, in which he deliberately foregrounds, for parts of the film,
other comedians, such as Charlie Callas in the former and Jan Murray
and Steve Franken in the lattera strategy that can be traced back to
The Bellboy, with the disruptive and hilarious nightclub performance
of the Las Vegas stage act the Novelites.)
Lewis refers explicitly to his own career and his status as a star in The
Bellboy, The Errand Boy, and The Patsy (he began doing this as early as
The Caddy). In a key section of The Bellboy, Lewis appears as himselfa
famous, powerful star surrounded and encumbered by a large entourage.
In The Errand Boy, the self-reference takes the form of a personal myth,
that of the movie fan from New Jersey who goes to Hollywood to be close
to the source of his dreams, only to find them farther away than ever.
Mortys story differs in a crucial respect from Lewiss: like Malcolm Smith
(Lewis) in Tashlins Hollywood or Bust, Morty made the trip to Hollywood
on his own initiative, as an unknown; when Lewis went to Hollywood, he
was already a star. Stanley Belts trajectory in The Patsy can also be seen
as a mythologizing of Lewiss career in that Stanley, too, rises from a low
social position and a career characterized by mishaps to become a star (the
film even contains an aborted reference to Lewiss own record act: to fill
time during his desultory stand-up debut at the Copa Caf, Stanley brings
a portable phonograph on stage, intending to mouth the lyrics to his own
hit record, but is unable to make the machine work). Stanleys ability to
triumph without his team of experienced show-business professionals
who, after discovering him and masterminding his rise to stardom, abandon him on the critical night of his guest appearance on The Ed Sullivan
Showcan be read as an oblique version of Lewiss success at obtaining
control over his career by functioning as writer, director, and producer. At
the end of the film, Lewis emerges, after the apparent accidental death
of the character he is playing, in his own persona as director and star
(making it explicit that the whole narrative, in which Stanley is called on
to substitute for an already dead star, is a self-reflexive fantasy in which
Lewis reinvents himself and starts over from the beginning). The Patsy
contains several more incidental self-references: during the splendidly
stylized street scenes of Ellen trying to get in touch with Stanley before
he receives the kiss-off letter from his staff, we see a Whos Minding the
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Store? poster (just as in The Disorderly Orderly there appears an ad for

The Patsy); even Stanleys entrance line (The bellboy) can be heard as
a reference to the title of Lewiss first directed film.
In his other films, Lewis incorporates self-referential notations and
lines and situations that resonate with his own biography. In The Big
Mouth, the joy of the gangster Thor (Harold J. Stone) at learning of
the supposed death of Valentine (the gangster played by Lewis) can be
heard as a comment on the animus against Lewis expressed by many
critics. In the same film, the hotel manager and other characters harbor
an irrational, excessive hatred of Lewis. As early as The Bellboy, Lewis
shows his consciousness of the difficulty of his position in American
popular culture: standing with his boss in front of the hotel, waiting for
the arrival of a famous star, a hotel employee apologizes for his initial
outburst of enthusiasm (And its Jerry Lewis!) by saying deprecatingly,
Our mother used to take me to see him when I was a kid. (Part of the
joke is that the man looks old enough to have been in college before
Lewis was born.) Byerss lament at the beginning of Which Way to the
Front? also strikes an autobiographical note: I have nothing to look
forward to, nothing but what Ive already done.
Lewis brings himselfhis history, his personality, his public image and its vicissitudesinto Hardly Working and Cracking Up with
an explicitness that is highly audacious even for him. Hardly Working
begins with an opening montage of greatest hits from Cinderfella, The
Errand Boy, Whos Minding the Store?, and other Lewis triumphs. This
sequence establishes that the hero of Hardly Working, Bo Hooper, is
fundamentally Jerry Lewis himself. The film relocates the star, playing an
aging clown who is suddenly thrown out of work, in a time that threatens
him with obsolescence and irrelevance (see fig. 4). In Cracking Up (like
the beginning of Hardly Working, a reintroduction to Lewis), the Lewis
characters response to his felt untimeliness is to attempt suicide. The
suicide motif seems to call out to be read as an autobiographical allusion
to Lewiss own suicide impulse (which he later revealed publicly). Unlike
Hardly Working, Cracking Up proposes no past glories to heighten a
contrast with the ignoble present. Still, Lewiss past swarms behind the
film. The scene in Cracking Up with Milton Berle in drag as a female
patient of Dr. Pletchick repeats the scene of Stanley waiting outside a
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row of phone booths in The Bellboy: again, the Lewis character hears
a womans voice saying things that arouse his amatory interest, but the
person who emerges turns out to be a man. Cracking Up repeats a motif
of the Lewis characters negative relationship with art objects, which
gives rise to a series of surrealistic gags, as in The Bellboy (the sculpture
whose still-soft clay Stanley inadvertently reshapes) and The Errand
Boy (the Samson figure between two pillars, framed portrait-like in
the cafeteria, who is actually three-dimensional and is holding together
structural materials, and whom Morty causes to fall by pulling a thread).
The cab driver running after a moving car in The Family Jewels and the
cheapjack airline in the same film reappear in Cracking Up.
Hardly Working and Cracking Up are apologies for the life of a
misfit, dropout manifestos. For Lewis in these late films, it is a question
of reconquering territory that has already been taken and abandoned.
Both films dramatize the regaining of confidence in spatial terms as a
regaining of position and of territory. In Cracking Up, Warren marks a
temporary triumph over his klutziness by managing to walk across the
floor of his psychiatrists office toward the doctors open arms. At the
Figure 4. Bo (Jerry Lewis) faces an uncertain

future in Hardly Working.
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end of the film, Warren walks againacross the street to two women
he successfully chats up.
In what is only apparently a paradox, Lewiss ubiquity as a performer
in his films goes along with a radical questioning of individuality and
identity. In the mirror scene in Sy Devores clothing shop in The Patsy,
when the tracking camera shows George Raft in a hitherto unrevealed
panel of the mirror, Stanley has so little sense of his own identity that he
mistakes Rafts reflection for his own. The confusion of person and cutout
in The BellboyStanley trying to deliver a message to the cutoutis
eloquent. In the spectacular society that Lewis depicts so scathingly,
a person counts for so little and has an identity so evanescent that a
photograph or a mirror image might be mistaken for the person him- or
herself. It is a world of flattened, manufactured images, a show-business
worldcreated by and for the business of showingin which people
are always signs of themselves.
Identity in Lewis is always performed; there is no private self, and
an audience is always present, often explicitly. In The Ladies Man, Herbert refuses to believe George Rafts claim of who he is and demands
that he prove his identity by, in effect, playing Raft. (Its revealing that
both of Rafts appearances in Lewiss films involve a questioning of
identity. Lewis uses Raft as an ideal masculine image to show that the
image is not only an image but first and foremost an image, one that
the Lewis character and George Raft himself have trouble living up
to.) Lewiss direction of actors insists on an exaggeration that implies
an awareness of an audience, suggesting that his characters (like those
of John Cassavetes) are constantly involved in performances of themselves. The social world of Lewiss films is luxuriantly stylized: Helen
Traubel as the fulsome boarding-house proprietor Mrs. Wellenmelon
in The Ladies Man, Bob Clayton as the smooth bell captain in The
Bellboy, the Jewish bellboys (and dog-track aficionados) in The Bellboy,
Howard McNear as the groveling Mr. Sneak in The Errand Boy, the
overplaying actors in the parody movie scenes of The Errand Boy.
James Bests performance as Chriss friend Ben introduces a hectic and
inflamed atmosphere into Three on a Couch. Irritation and frustration
are constant in Lewiss universe, giving rise to a generalized aggression
that frequently takes the Lewis character as its target: for example, the
24
Jerry Lewis
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Figure 5. Jerry Lewis and Del Moore

in The Big Mouth.
vehemence of Neil Hamiltons lawyer in The Family Jewels and the

hyperbolic rage of the hotel manager in The Big Mouth (see fig. 5).
The Big Mouth showcases Clamsons reactions to the various grotesques who confront him and the absurd situations in which he finds
himself. His attempt to transpose his encounters with the criminals into
the register of ordinary social interaction, of ordinary display of self,
takes him through various stages of self-creation. Before his encounter
with Valentine, his double, its as if he has forgotten himself or been in
hiding: he has to relearn and reinvent himself, to become himself again
(or for the first time). The question for him is, How to be? Answering this
question, his gestures and actions are immediate, quick, and simple. To
the deliberately smooth, Everyman-like manner Lewis adopts as actor
for the moments when Clamson appears as himself, Lewis as director
contrasts a range of grotesques: Thor roaring at his three subordinates,
the transformations they undergo after encountering Clamson (whom
they believe to be the resurrected Valentine), the irrational murderous
vengefulness of the hotel manager. While Clamson becomes more and
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more simple and direct, the other characters (except Suzie, his ally)
fall prey to a fatality for extremity and exaggeration. What Clamson encounters in other people is exemplified in an extreme way by the figure
of the lunatic who claims to be the chief of the FBI: reckless solipsism
and a fixation on the imaginary self.
Be somebodybe anybody. This exhortation, spoken (and printed
on a card) near the end of The Nutty Professor by Kelps milquetoast
father (Howard Morris) after his transformation into a dominating huckster, is carried out by Chris Pride in Three on a Couch, whose status as
an established artist marks Lewiss own emergence in a mature role
(perhaps we should say majoritarian, in the Deleuze-Guattari senses of
normative, dominant, and colonizing): he no longer plays the put-upon,
humiliated misfit (though not for the first time in his career: already we
have seen Lewis-as-star in The Bellboy, Morty-as-star at the end of The
Errand Boy, and Stanley-as-star at the end of The Patsy; weve seen
Buddy Love and Uncle Everett). Unlike Kelp in The Nutty Professor,
Chris apparently has no internal difficulty to overcome: his difficulty is
presented as something outside him. But this external difficulty, through
his manner of opposing it, reveals the cracks within himself, and he is
progressively forced to abandon his majoritarian position.
Three on a Couch is thus the inverse of The Nutty Professor, in which
Kelp seeks to improve his self-image through chemistry. In Three on a
Couch, the man who has made it and who has all kinds of success (Im
just completely secure, Chris tells Elizabeth early in the film) is compelled to go back down the ladder, to reinvent himself in more limited
and grotesque forms. Chriss varied characterizations all deviate from
the standard that he himself represents. They are less universal than
he is: they are aficionados (of physical fitness, rodeo, and entomology),
one is a woman (and thus deviant or defective within the phallocentric
world the film depictsand criticizes), and they have regional accents.
This process is a metaphor for Lewiss basic conception of comedy, as
he stated it in his interview with me: In order to make your audience
laugh, you have to dramatically change who you are. I wont trip over
that piece of wood on the stage if its me walking there. But Jerry will,
or Stanley, or the Idiot, or whatever we call him in that moment. He has
to trip over it. Now, he has to turn into something that isnt truly him,
so were taking a piece of vanity and rubbing it out, a little ego, burying
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it, sandpapering all that down, and bringing up all of the gargoyles. ...
Theres nothing more dramatic than that moment. ... Because I have
to call on something thats not what I want to be at that moment. I want
to be there with my girl or my wife watching some other schmuck make
a fool of himself. But I never ever thought of what I did as demeaning.
What I thought of it was: other than me at that moment.
Chris calculates each of his impersonations to appeal to one of Elizabeths three patients, on the basis of what he knows about their interests,
backgrounds, and case histories. Beyond the traits he assumes to attract
the women (Rutherford has only to be interested in zoology, to be shy
with women, and to speak with a southern accent; Ringo has only to be
a westerner; Warren has only to be athletic), the content of the characterization is free. Why, to attract Mary Lou (Leslie Parrish), does Chris
become the prissy Rutherford (and, first, Rutherfords devoted sister,
Heather) rather than some other character? (A similar question could
be asked about Cracking Up. The bank robber, the country sheriff: what
are these persons?) The first answer is: he has to be somebody. Nobody
can be just an abstract person, a nonentity (though Clamson in The Big
Mouth comes close). Since we have to be somebody, the Lewis character
seems to say, lets be somebody special.
Related to this imperative is Kelps realization, in The Nutty Professor, that you might as well like yourself. Kelps conclusion has yet to
be corrected by the film, and, though Lewis seems to make it as difficult
as possible to separate his own authorial voice from Kelps at this point
(with Kelp addressing the silent onscreen audience at the prom), we
should resist the temptation to believe that Kelp is here delivering the
films definitive message. The correction comes in the final sequence,
with the reappearance of Kelps parents and the snake-oil-salesmans
pitch of Kelps father. In light of the fathers speech, we might amend
Kelps message at the prom: go ahead and like yourself, and why not,
since you are, in essence, anybody. All identities are roles that can
be purchased, altered, borrowed (Lewis shows that Kelp, under the
guidance of Stella [Stella Stevens], has already begun to correct his
appearance, with braces on his teeth and product in his hair). I can be
you, and you can be methe principle of equivalence or exchange that
the psychiatrist and his patient obey at the end of Cracking Up.
The person is optional and unreal in Lewiss films, nothing more
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than a set of possibilities or a collection of stereotypes (as in Cracking

Up). Lewis makes the invention of a character an explicit theme when,
in Which Way to the Front?, the members of Byerss team give their
various impressions of Kesselrings walk, which each man endows with
imaginary eccentricities seemingly borrowed from his own ideal selfimage. A character is always a collection of traits, such as the glasses,
voice, hairstyle, and clothes of the second Clamson (The Big Mouth) and
the kabuki wig, white face makeup (reduction to zero), and kimono he
dons in an attempt to hide in plain sight from his pursuers. In The Big
Mouth, the basis to which all these changes are applied is a blank: the
bookkeeper Clamson, neither ridiculous nor admirable, not anything
much at all apart from his function and his vacation-time hobby, just
as Stanley in The Bellboy defines himself entirely by his work and his
relation to it. None of Lewiss other characters are much more than that
(which makes them no less human; rather the contrary).
The Lewis character has an infinite receptive capacity; he is hypersensitive and ready to incorporate anything felt, believed, or projected
by another person. Gilles Deleuze writes of Lewis, Everything resonates in his head and in his soul (88). In a classic scene in The Nutty
Professor, the various sounds in the classroom, magnified, resonate within Kelp. In Hardly Working, Bo takes into himself and emits Ballings
voice, laboriously repeating his pedantic instructions. In The Errand
Boy, Morty introjects the names Babewosentall and Wabenlottnee (but
discharges them differently). The Lewis character is always a receiver (a
theme that is most fully developed in Tashlins The Disorderly Orderly,
in which Jeromes sympathy pains mimic his patients symptoms),
though he is often a carrier, too (of mail, as in The Ladies Man, The
Errand Boy, and Hardly Working). He is always potentially anybody
and always takes into himself, acts out, and extends the possibilities he
encounters in other people.
As Jean-Louis Comolli points out, however, Why so many doubles
thrown to the four winds of the screen, if not in order not to be them?
(Comolli 54). The multiplication of Lewiss selveshis caricatures of a
studio head, a director, and a writer in the trailer for The Bellboy (depicting filmmaking as discontinuity and fragmentation of identity); his
seven roles in The Family Jewels; and Chriss disguises in Three on a
Couch provide striking examplesis a form of negation, just as Mortys
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mimicry of his bosses in The Errand Boy is a way of rejecting the overpowerful paternal authority they represent. Moreover, the multiplication
of Lewises in his films, rather than being merely narcissistic, is only one
form of a general multiplicity that explodes across the screen (in, for
example, the proliferation of women in the morning sequence of The
Ladies Man).
Its hard to deny that Lewiss work is, nevertheless, devoted to a cult
of the self (which partly accounts for the strong negative reactions he has
inspired in many). His work is a multidimensional and self-contradictory
staging of selfhood: an artists documentation and consideration of his
own existence. In this connection, The Patsy and Cracking Up are especially interesting as the two Lewis films in which he directly confronts
the possibility of his own characters death (as he does, more obliquely,
in The Family Jewels and The Big Mouth): the films try to define and
preserve selfhood even as they play with its disappearance, only to end
up acknowledging the fictional and optional nature of selfhood and (like
Three on a Couch) the untenability of any standard of success. The
possibility that identity and individuality could be eradicated or annulled
always lies underneath the dazzling variety of Lewiss playful constructions of identity: the opening of Hardly Working owes its melancholy
to Bos sudden painful realization that his identity as a clown has been
cancelled, and the rest of the film will detail (though obscurely and
brokenly) his progress toward resuming it.
A real discontinuity in Lewiss biographyone day he was a nobody,
and the next day he was a starconstantly remains within his grasp or,
rather, constantly threatens him, making him insecure in his success (I
see the stage suddenly turn to sawdust, my tux change to a tramps outfit,
and I feel as though people are looking at me like Im some kind of freak
in a sideshow [Lewis and Gluck 290]). Lewiss insistence on representing
this insecurity and facing it directly makes The Nutty Professor deeply
painful, just as The Big Mouth is so lacerating and uncomfortable because
it exposes the arbitrariness of any decision to be any person whatever.
The role is independent from the person playing it, but at the time of
the performance the person exists only through the role. In The Family
Jewels, Uncle Everett, the egocentric clown who is filled with loathing
for his audience and his fellow performers, can be played by Everett
himself and, at the end of the film, by Willard. In Which Way to the
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Front?, Kesselring can be played by himself and by Byers. The role is

a block of identity that different agents can activate at different times.
The arbitrariness of the person is related to the arbitrariness of the films
premise: when the two coincide, as in The Errand Boy and The Patsy,
we reach the quintessence of Lewisian cinema.
Where does life end and performance begin? The Errand Boy and
The Patsy propose a continuity between the two. The famed columnist
Hedda Hopper tells Stanleys handlers in The Patsy: Youve come across
somebody who hasnt yet learned to be phony. He felt something, and
he said it, which was real and honest. And now if you apply that to his
performance, youve got a great success. In The Errand Boy, Mortys
attempts to cope with a spouting champagne bottle are captured on
film, and his performance is pronounced hilarious by three experts.
One of them (Robert Ivers) is a New York director (whose declamatory
style is itself Method-like, New York) who defines acting in this way:
Anyone in the world would give anything to do a performance. Because
performing is nothing more than a form of expression. But not anyone is
capable of expressing themselves openly and freely. And therefore only
a few, only a very few are chosen. Chosen to communicate and express
for the millions that either cant, dont know how, or would never get the
opportunity to do so. And those few that are chosen are called actors.
But theyre still people. And I might add, a very special kind of people.
This communicative power has a special priority and purity for Lewis. It
can cut through the apparatus of mass media and render irrelevant the
system (and the class) of technocrats and experts who organize perception. At the beginning of The Patsy, Lewis is careful to emphasize that
the dead comedian Wally Brandford taught his handlers most of what
they know about show business.
Near the end of The Patsy, Stanley Belt appears on the Ed Sullivan
Show in a skit that, ostensibly, he has improvised, or at any rate created
himself (since we are told that he has not used any of the material that
Chic [Phil Harris] wrote for him), and his performance is declared a great
success.3 The sequence was originally intended as a flashback to Stanleys
previous experience, which he relates to Ellen. It was switched to its final
position in the film when the routine Lewis had written for the Ed Sullivan Show sequenceStanley undergoing a series of mishaps on the set
of a car commercialturned out not to work. The logic of the rejected
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Jerry Lewis
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car-commercial sequence, which might have been more intelligible than

the sequence that appears in the film, is the same as that of the scene with
the champagne bottle in The Errand Boy: the Lewis characters revelation
of performance skill emerges unintentionally (this logic appears earlier
in The Patsy, in the cocktail-party scene with Hedda Hopper). The logic
of the premiere sequence in the final film is ambivalent: either we assume that Stanley has, without his handlers knowledge, taken over their
functions by writing, rehearsing, and staging his own skit with the Ed
Sullivan Shows actors and crew, or we read the scene as a fantasyan
option that may appear more insistent if we reflect on the similarities
between this scene (in which the down-at-heel Lewis figure inventively
transforms himself into a toff in evening dress to crash a movie premiere)
and the classic ballroom scene in Tashlins Cinderfella.4 Both are scenes of
metamorphosis, involving the revelation of a performance mastery that is
also the revelation of a personality, an assumed identity that may be taken
as more real than the real identity.
In Lewiss films, the assumption of identity takes the metaphorical
form of the performance of a job. Work is a double determination: on the
one hand, a persons possibilities need to be fixed and defined (which is
to say, the indeterminateness of these possibilities needs to be denied);
on the other hand, the worker, in being given a task, comes to feel that
he or she has a role and a place. In The Ladies Man, work is defined as
giving someone things to do so he or she will feel needed. The ostensible product of the labor has marginal value; the main value lies in the
feelings of participation and necessity that are its by-products. (Dana
Polan writes that in Lewiss films, ... work [is] not really imagined
as alienation after all [Polan, Working Hard 214].) Byerss project
in Which Way to the Front?, arising out of the need to overcome the
armys crushing and disorienting rejection, is a labor of this type: that
Byers and his band of volunteers form a functioning unit that helps the
Allies win World War II is secondary: the emphasis throughout is on
the arbitrary exercise of Byerss power of performance in situations in
which he finds himself (disguised as Kesselring) in the central role.
The abstract requirement for the new position of studio spy, as stated
by Mr. Paramutual (Brian Donlevy) in The Errand Boy: someone who is
anybody, whom nobody knows, who doesnt care about his own problems
or anybody elses, who has no interest in money. Morty appears magi An American Dream
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cally to fulfill these requirements, just as, in The Nutty Professor, Love
appears magically to fulfill the requirements that Kelp has internalized
(from their dissemination in culture) for an ideal masculine image. It is
as if Mortys presence and even his existence were summoned up by the
studio executives words. All employees are nonpersons who come into
being and assume a definite form only by entering the position, the role,
the job. Just as Chris Pride in Three on a Couch divides into different
people to carry out his planbecoming, as he does so, more vivid and
more realBo in Hardly Working divides into different people and
becomes, in turn, each of his jobs.
The Lewis characters peculiar relationships with money highlight
the significance of the job in their world. The scene in The Patsy in which
Stanley, taking Ellen to a fancy restaurant, demonstrates his unfamiliarity with tipping etiquette by giving lavish tips to each member of a long
succession of service personnel, is a masterpiece of awkwardness (see
fig. 6). In this scene, Lewis plays on an aporia of the quantification of
humanity in money: it is abusive to reduce a person to an amount of
money, yet service providers must be paid something. Stanleys error
is to attempt to compensate for the dehumanization inherent in paying someone a wage by indefinitely inflating the wagean error that is
Figure 6. The tipping scene in The Patsy:

Jerry Lewis and Ina Balin.
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Jerry Lewis
9/11/09 11:14:19 AM
acutely embarrassing for everyone because it reveals the contradiction

within the system.
Only with Three on a Couch does the Lewis character for the first
time acquire the competence to control money and deal in specific
quantities of it. Told that his prize amounts to the equivalent in French
francs of ten thousand dollars, give or take, Chris replies, You give,
Ill takereversing Stanleys procedure in The Patsy. In Which Way
to the Front?, Byers has so much money that possession is no longer
a challenge to him, and he secures the participation of his wavering
recruits by promising them one hundred thousand dollars each at the
completion of their mission.
Money is less decisive than the job in securing identity (though
money is the power that also threatens to reveal the illusory nature of
the identity thus secured). Asked by his sister (Susan Oliver) what he
really wants, Bo replies in terms that recall Kelps fathers exhortation
at the end of The Nutty Professor and Mortys account of himself to
Magnolia in The Errand Boy: I want what I never realized I wanted.
To be somebody. Not just anybody, but somebody. With a direction
and a purpose. For as long as I can remember, I thought I was satisfied with this job, that job, any job. As long as I had three squares a
day and a place to put my head. But I think its about time I dug some
roots for myself. With a steady job and steady money. This speech,
with its critical distinguishing of somebody from anybody, can be
heard as a riposte to Kelps father at the end of The Nutty Professor.
It propounds an ideological confusionof personal identity with a
jobthat Hardly Working finally rejects, even though Bo utters the
speech in apparent sincerity, and his adoring sister takes it as proof of
his new maturity. The film finally denounces the steady job, and the
direction and the purpose it confers, as denying human possibilities,
whereas Bos vocation of clown puts him in contact with the indeterminateness of these possibilities. The end of Hardly Working recalls
that of The Family Jewels: the protagonist turns his back on society
and sets out with his loved one (like the Tramp and the girl at the end
of Chaplins Modern Times [1936]) toward an uncertain future. Like
The Family Jewels, Hardly Working is an apparently sentimental and
conformist film that discloses a deep distrust of the dominant values
of its society.
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Saying No to No
In The Errand Boy, Morty stumbles into a group of suits of armor that
first appear to be empty costumes propped against a wall but that, after
he knocks them over, prove to be filled by human wearers who slowly
rouse themselves and struggle to get up from the ground. This scene,
like the later one in which Morty is mistaken for a prop dummy, invokes
the frightening uncertainty of the mannequin, the instability of the line
separating the animate and the inanimate, the susceptibility of the human individual to be replaced by a double. In a flashback sequence in
Cracking Up, a dummy is accidentally liberated from prison in place of
Warren Nefrons hapless French ancestor (played by Lewis). In Tashlins Hollywood or Bust, Steve (Dean Martin) and Malcolm (Lewis) gain
access to a movie studio by pretending to be, respectively, a prop man
and a dummy (questioned by a suspicious guard, Steve assures him,
Thats a real dummy). In a resonant gag in Tashlins The Disorderly
Orderly, Jerome (Lewis), out for a walk on the hospital lawn with a
patient encased completely in a plaster body-cast, inattentively leaves
him standing on the edge of a hill for a moment, only for the mummy
to collapse, roll down the hill, and shatter against a tree. When Jerome
reaches the wreckage, he finds the plaster pieces to be hollow.
The mannequin is an extreme form of a figure that appears often in
Lewiss films: the unresponsive partner. Typically, this person remains
stone-faced before the antics of the Lewis character, like Henry Silvas
stepbrother Maximilian in Tashlins Cinderfella, whose cigarette Lewiss
Fella repeatedly tries to light with destructive results. Since the unresponsive partner represents a development of the founding duality of
the Martin and Lewis partnershipin Lewiss words, a handsome man
and a monkeya duality that has remained important to Lewiss work
since the breakup of the comedy team, it is worthwhile to analyze that
duality here.
The origins of the act lay in Lewiss unrehearsed interruption of Martins nightclub performance (Lewis and Kaplan 22). Perhaps the inaugural duality of the team, more basic than handsomeness/simianness, lies
here: continuity versus rupture. During one of their first shows together,
Lewis shut off all the lights in the nightclub while Martin was singing
Pennies from Heaven, befuddling the musicians and making them
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9/11/09 11:14:19 AM
stop playing. [A]nd Deanof course!never hesitated for a second.

... Going on with his number (even a capella) was a matter of pride for
him. Improvising a small spotlight by holding his Zippo lighter close to
his face, Martin finished his song in the mellow flicker of its flame just
as though nothing at all had happened (Lewis and Kaplan 328). Always,
its a question of rhythm. Commenting on his partners magical sense
of timing, Lewis exults: I cant tell you what this looks like to somebody
whose life is predicated on rhythm (Lewis and Kaplan 42).
Martins smooth imperturbability in the presence of chaos made him
a perfect foil for Lewis. Some part of [Martin] was always standing back,
making fun of what he did, Lewis writes (Lewis and Kaplan 36). The
singers background predisposed him to this even detachment. Martins
Italian immigrant parents, according to Lewis, brought him up with a
coldness and harshness that made young Dino feel lonely and unloved
(feelings he shared with the young Lewis, though for different reasons)
and that left him with a fundamental sense of solitude and a refusal to
betray emotioneven, Lewis believed, to the point of being unable to
feel his own pain (Lewis and Kaplan 275). Though he maintained that
distance from everybody except me, in Lewiss words, so that the two
men established a closeness [that] worked for us, bonding us in the
way the audiences loved (Lewis and Kaplan 104), that distance also set
him apart from Lewis and gave the team what Andrew Sarris called a
marvelous tension (243).
According to Sarris, this tension was not preserved in Martin and
Lewiss movies (243). Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that
though tension, and sometimes even hostility, between the partners does
come through quite sharply in the films (especially such late ones as
Taurogs Youre Never Too Young [1955] and Tashlins Hollywood or Bust,
during the making of which the two stars, off-camera, were not on speaking terms), what sometimes fails to come through, or comes through to
a lesser degree, is the element that made the tension marvelous: their
compensating closeness. Frank Krutnik sums up the chemistry between
Martin and Lewis as a conflictual harmony that encompasses closeness and distance, tenderness and hostility, euphoria and ambivalence
(Krutnik, Sex and Slapstick 113). The special performance relationship
Martin and Lewis enjoyed comes across less directly in their films than
in their appearances as regular guest hosts of the Colgate Comedy Hour
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television series, in which, as Scott Bukatman notes, Martin reveals an

ability to follow and respond to Lewis, providing a measure of control
while sharing in the delights of comic anarchy (190).
In his solo and especially his self-directed films, Lewis breaks up,
modifies, reinvents, and recasts various aspects of the complex structural
role Martin played in relation to him. The masterful, well-liked Martin
returns in the double figure played by Lewis himself in his own films:
one who attains a social success that is denied his alter ego (who is in
some cases his previous self): Jerry Lewis in The Bellboy, Morty as star
at the end of The Errand Boy, Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor, the
vindicated and newly self-confident Stanley (shortly to metamorphose
into director/star Jerry Lewis) at the end of The Patsy, the self-assured
Warren at the end of Cracking Up. (The six uncles in The Family Jewels
are all parodies of the socially successful male figure: though they have
achieved some degree of success and independence, they are clearly
inept in their professions.) Another aspect of Martinthe sponsor or
supporter of the Lewis character, linking him to mainstream society
reemerges as the friend, counselor, helper, or expert incarnated by such
figures as Ben in Three on a Couch, the Peter Lawford character in
Hook, Line, and Sinker (credited to George Marshall but produced
by Lewis and bearing, in parts, his stylistic signature [see Lewis, Total
Film-Maker 33 and Benayoun 31314]), and the psychiatrist in Cracking Up. Of these, Ben in Three on a Couch is the most interesting case:
if he is vestigially Martin-like in conspiring with and legitimizing the
Lewis figure (in Living It Up, for example, Martin plays the physician
who helps the Lewis character maintain the fiction that he is dying of an
incurable disease) and establishing a link between the Lewis figure and
the larger society, he is a Martin become uncomplainingly subservient
to his partners personality and designs. As played by James Best, Ben,
unlike Martin, has little self-control and is not cool: repeatedly, he makes
so obvious his panicked reaction to the emergence of possible setbacks
to their scheme that Chris has to enjoin him to relax.
Chris Pepper in One More Time is another interesting variation on
the friend character: in this film, it is the relatively well-adjusted, wellsocialized, Martinesque male (whose normative function is also racialized, since Chris is white, while Charlie is black) who splits into two
roles (Chris and his twin brother, Sydney). The film also expands on the
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theme of betrayalpresent in several Martin and Lewis filmsin the

Hound of the Baskervilles-esque plot element of Chriss failure to let
Charlie in on his plan to disguise himself and even allowing Charlie to
believe that he is dead, while a certain irony is also present in Charlies
delay in recognizing Chris. Betrayal is also a key element in The Patsy,
Hook, Line, and Sinker, and the unreleased The Day the Clown Cried.
Most crucially, Martins distance and his refusal to be moved are
embodied in unresponsive-partner figures like Maximilian in Cinderfella,
the bell captain in The Bellboy, and Dr. Warfield (Del Moore) in The
Nutty Professorsurrogate older brothers or fathers whom the Lewis
character desperately and ineptly tries to please, only to be met with
a mask of disapproval or indifference. In other films, the figure of the
unresponsive partner is more generalized. Lewis breaks down the great
elevator sequence of The Errand Boy into a series of two-shot confrontations in which Morty is noseto-nose with another person who refuses to
acknowledge him. In the early recruiting-office sequence of Which Way
to the Front?, Lewis cuts between Byerss out-of-control babbling (in
response to the word rejection) and the amazed reactions of his fellow
4-Fs. On his first appearance in The Patsy, Stanley, presenting himself
at the door of the Brandford staffs suite with an ice bucket and a tray
of glasses, keeps up, in the face of the others silence, a commentary on
what he has just done, what he is now doing, and what he could do next.
You see when I, uh, I had it, my, all my clothes were wet, so I changed
my clothes, because when I w, thats why I was long. Should I p-put,
or not? Just stand? Ill close the door. IllIllthe key ring is caught
in the, uh, door, but Ill get theI can rinse all of these out. . . .
Throughout The Ladies Man, Herbert comments on his own reactions and his own situation: Ooh, Im scared to death (when the
fearsome animal Baby is loose); his hand burning on the toaster (in
an ineffable moment of delayed sensation); his button caught in Mrs.
Wellenmelons flower (the TV show); the skin of his back caught in the
crack of the door that someone has closed on him (the mail-delivery
sequence). These commentaries make the event present while distancing and banishing it, situating it in the reality of bodies and in the quasireality of things reported, and presenting the body, too, as wavering
between those two spheres, proposing processes of thought, feeling,
and sensation as purely optional aspects of experience and identity
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(speeches like the one in The Patsy have a rapidly self-correcting, selfdenying quality, as if the Lewis character were rewriting his own being
and commenting on the process of doing so).
At the lair of the nefarious Fong (Leonard Stone) in The Big Mouth,
Clamson not only describes to the crooks what is happening to him but
explains the patterns of his behavior: If I detect hostility in people, I
tend to submerge my inner emotional structure. Now, to expound on
what I feel in my heart. . . . Lewis can rarely resist giving the expression of self-insight a parodic form (the speech is heard in voiceover on
a shot of the unsympathetic Bambi [Jeannine Riley] in the doorway,
which further distances Clamson from us), just as in Which Way to the
Front?, Byers expresses his self-insight in the language of late-sixties/
early-seventies U.S. pop psychology (one of the many anachronisms
with which this film, set in 1943, is sprinkled): I cant say yes to no. I
have to say no to no.
These Lewisian self-commentaries are invariably addressed to an
interlocutor, who is usually silent (as in the scene in The Patsy), or to the
camera. They are not closed circuits; they acknowledge and depend on
the presence of the viewer as a potential supporter: the self-commentary
goes toward the reverse field and seems hopeful of getting back from it
a look, and laughter, that would make the happening more present and
more distanced. Yet the absence of the owner of the look and the real
absence of the interlocutor are strongly marked. The Lewis character is
the one who feels and metamorphoses; the interlocutor might well be
made of stone (as Maximilians face seems to be in Cinderfella). Again,
this structure dates back to Martin and Lewis. In Lewiss words, These
were two guys who were in love with each other. They adored one another. One that could show it, and one that couldnt (qtd. in Bukatman
199). Lewis had the filmmaking insight, when he ascended to directing,
to translate Martins absence into a purely cinematic figure to play against:
the reverse field, a site of desolation and rejection from which nothing
comes back, completing the Lewis characters solitude.
The line between field and reverse field is a break. Instead of fusion
there is a confrontation between the two fields. In cinema, the extreme,
pure form of confrontationthe 180degree cuthas something absolute about it. It can be felt as a violation (of the 180degree rule), or it
can be felt as the revelation that space is occupied, that what is absent
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Jerry Lewis
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from one field is present in another, that every shot is taken from a point
in space that necessarily excludes itself from its optical field. Jean-Pierre
Oudart writes: Within the framework of a cinematic nonc constructed
on a shot/reverse-shot principle, the appearance of a lack perceived as
a Some One (the Absent One) is followed by its abolition by someone
(or something) placed within the same field (4647). Contrary to Oudarts claim that cinema (in the process he calls suture, borrowing
a term from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory) always abolishes or fills
its lacks (thus promoting the illusion of the presence of the subject in
the signifying chain of discourse), Lewiss cinema confronts the shot
and its reverse shot with each other in a meeting that fails to reduce a
fundamental incompatibility between them. The two shots encounter
each other not as a lack and its fulfillment, a question and its answer, or
a cause and its effect, but rather as two parallel surfaces.
A striking example of such a confrontation occurs in The Errand
Boy. On the first day on his new job, Morty is introduced to Mr. Wabenlottnee (Benny Rubin) of the wardrobe department. The man tries to
simplify the introduction for Morty by dictating his own name syllable
by syllable. The cutting volleys between two frontal close-ups, one of
Wabenlottnee, the other of Morty (each of whom looks directly into the
camerathe effect is extraordinary, as if speech had become directly
visible): the man speaks a syllable, then Morty repeats it, and so forth.
But, at the end of the series, when Morty tries to put the whole name
together, it comes out something like Babonottin.
Another example occurs in The Patsy, during Stanleys unsuccessful
rehearsal for his debut at the Copa Caf. His stumbling monologue is
broken up after each phrase by a cut to a reverse shot of Chic moaning
as if in pain. Earlier in the film, Stanley wanders around the parlor of
Professor Mueller (Hans Conreid), trying out various antique chairs and
upsetting, but catching, vases and other objects, while, in shots intercut
with Stanleys antics, Mueller watches and reacts in silent anguish. In all
these sequences, the duration of the intercutting becomes felt not only
as a source of humor but also as an additional source of strangeness.
The shot triggers its reverse shot; the reverse shot punctuates the shot.
Nothing passes between one shot and the other. The course of one shot
is not altered because of the other; they represent two independent
processes confronting each other but not leading to any synthesisif
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anything, they lead to an anti-suture, since not only the subject but also
any form of imaginary coherence and any totalizing signifying chain
are excluded and denied.
Although the onscreen characters look plays a role in the functioning of the reverse field, Lewiss cinema reveals that there is another
onscreen element that more fundamentally constitutes the reverse field:
the face. Lewiss cinema (like Cassavetess) is to a great extent a cinema
of faces: their expressiveness or concealedness; the face as a suffering,
sensitive membrane faithfully expressing internal processes (as Stanley
philosophizes in The Patsy, I always say that the eyes are the windows
of the soul, and if shades are up, then . . .) or as an impassive surface
blocking and denying them.
Sometimes a person looking at the Lewis character looks straight
at the camera, while he, in the complementary shot, does not. In the
first long sequence of The Patsy, the dead Wallys immobilized handlers
stand like statues in a wide medium shot, staring at the camera, transfixed by the apparition of Stanley with his ice. Later, a series of closeups shows each of them looking directly at the camera (Do we look
dishonest?); in the reverse close shot of Stanley, he looks slightly away
from the camera lens. In The Nutty Professor, there is a subjective
traveling shot ostensibly from Loves point of view as he approaches
the Purple Pit, passing a succession of people who stare, frozen, at
the camera. The Lewis character often has the ability to strike people
dumb with awe or disbelief and freeze them. An extreme example is in
The Big Mouth, in which the apparition of Clamson emerging from the
water causes Gunner (Vern Rowe) to become paralyzed on all fours.
Later in the film, first Studs (Buddy Lester) and then Rex (Charlie
Callas) are reduced to gibbering by the sight of Clamson. In The Nutty
Professor, Buddy Lesters bartender is turned into a statue not by the
sight of Buddy Love but by a taste of the Alaskan Polar-Bear Heater
he has just mixed under Loves direction.
Lewis writes: Some film-makers believe that you should never have
an actor look directly into the camera. They maintain it makes the audience uneasy, and interrupts the screen story. I think it is nonsense, and
usually have my actors, in a single, look direct into the camera at least
once in a film if a point is to be served (Total Film-Maker 12021). In
The Nutty Professor, after Buddy suddenly leaps over a wall and vanishes
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during their first private meeting, Stella turns and stares at the camera.
She does so again after Buddys staggering exit out of the Purple Pit,
where he has just abandoned his attempt to sing Im in the Mood for
Love. In The Ladies Man, Herbert turns to the camera to repeat one
word from the stream of rapturous and admiring phrases a Marilyn
Monroelike starlet has just addressed to him: Blond? At the curtain
calls that conclude The Nutty Professor and The Patsy, each of the main
actors walks toward and looks into the camera.
The look toward the camera reaches out of the space of the film to
confront the viewer. In The Big Mouth, in which the tendency reaches its
height, this is accomplished inaugurallyby the narratorthen repetitively and systematically throughout the film. During the tennis-lesson
scene, Bambi looks at the camera blankly, as if amazed by Clamsons
ineptitude (like the nurse in Tashlins The Disorderly Orderly who stares
at the camera, stunned, while Jerome entraps her and himself in the
bandage he is wrapping around a patient). Later, Clamson looks at the
camera to repeat, uncomprehendingly, Suzies parting words: A cold
shower? When he realizes that Webster, the FBI man, is delusional,
Clamson stares at the camera in shock. Suzie, alone in the kitchen after Clamson yells I love you! in her ear (before leaving to rejoin the
gangster in the living room), turns to look at the camera. Studs looks
at the camera while Gunner, who apparently imagines himself to be a
dog, relieves himself by a tree at Sea World.
Clamsons stare at the camera in the scene with the delusional Webster implies the dawning of shared knowledge. It is also an extreme
form of a kind of look toward the camera that has a long history in film
comedy, and whose locus classicus is the work of Laurel and Hardy. This
look implies or assumes complicity and like-thinking, and it expresses
the helplessness and aloneness of the onscreen person who, driven to
frustration, has no one to turn to except us. The look toward the camera
is an appeal for help and sympathy, as if the viewer were, potentially,
the double of the onscreen character, or as if the character were the
viewers onscreen delegate who endures, reacts, suffers, and struggles
on the viewers behalf and in the viewers absence. But Clamsons look
is extreme because the look, the scene, and their context together make
it clear that no help is sought or expected: it is just a formal gesture, a
signifier of the request for help, produced in a hopeless situation. The
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direct gaze at the camera becomes the sign of failed communication:

a request for sympathy or help, or an appeal for unity that mistakes its
mark and merely asserts the apartness of the appealing character.
Sometimes the internal properties of the image designate a look in
a Lewis film as a subjective shot. In The Ladies Man, Herbert puts on
his glasses, and in the reverse shot, the girls in the cafeteria come into
focus. Earlier in the film, the camera executes a succession of jerky
zoom-ins on a Help Wanted sign as seen from Herberts point of view
as he waits at the bus stop across the street. In both shots, vision is defective: if Herbert, or another Lewis character, is a misfit (as Warren
Nefron in Cracking Up calls himself), its not only because of his external
characteristics but because of the way he sees the world. The Nutty
Professor contains a series of internally subjective shots: the ninetydegree canted shot of Stella from the point of view of Kelp, horizontal
on the shelf; the out-of-focus subjective shot from the point of view of
Kelp, who has removed his glasses, of people in the bowling alley lined
up like bowling pins; the traveling shot from Loves point of view as
he makes his way to the Purple Pit; the shot of Stella listening to Love
serenade her on piano, as smoke from his cigarette wafts into the shot
from behind the camera; Stella slowly coming into focus when Kelp,
during his confession speech, puts his glasses on. In one extraordinary
shot, points of view diverge, and narrative purposes fall out of alignment:
as Stella talks to Kelp about how innocuous the notorious Purple Pit is,
the camera tracks in to a close-up of her; when the camera frames her
in the close-up, the image becomes diffused. At the end of the shot, she
looks at the camera and blinks.
In The Family Jewels, Donna looks into the lens of Uncle Juliuss
camera, which becomes, momentarily, our lens (in an iris shot). Later,
Julius adjusts the mount in front of his camera (which is our camera),
the mount becoming visible as a frame within the frame and emphasizing the composed nature of the image and the arbitrariness inherent in
composition. This moment recalls Lewiss curtain call (in character as
Kelp) in The Nutty Professor, during which he stumbles and falls into
the camera lens. In the scene of the three crooks visiting Gunner in the
hospital in The Big Mouth, there is a low-angle subjective shot of Thor
caressing the camera lens.
In Lewis, the lens is not merely a point in space, an abstract func42
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tion that organizes images, or a metaphor for consciousness grasping

the world. The lens is a physical thing. Lewis relates point of view to the
material existence of the camera and the physical position it occupies in
space. In The Family Jewels, Julius repeatedly presses his finger onto the
lens of his camera to show Donna where to look; he even comments on
this gesture, Youll have a face full of fingers. In The Bellboy, Stanley,
carrying cigarettes, newspapers, and other items into a room filled with
nglige-wearing female models, advances to the foreground and prudishly covers the lens with the palm of his hand. In the ball sequence in
One More Time, Charlies long-suppressed sneeze finally erupts as he
lurches forward, Kelp-like, into the camera lens. The cut shows a reverse field in which alreadyin the instant of the cutthe exaggerated
force of the sneeze has toppled a group of party guests, who slowly start
picking themselves up from the floor (like the animated suits of armor
in The Errand Boy).
Characters move toward the foreground to block the lens (in The
Errand Boy, a prop man who picks up the dummy Morty to find it
coming alive in his arms runs into the camera in terror) or withdraw from
the lens to reveal the scene (as when Mr. Sneak enters Mr. Paramutuals
office). In the Sullivan Show skit in The Patsy, Stanley, after his elaborate costume transformation, walks into the camera; Lewis then cuts to
Stanley walking away from the camera, down the red carpet, and into
the theater. At the end of The Family Jewels, Donna and Willard walk
into the camera; there is a cut, and then they are walking away from
the camera. In the disco fantasy sequence of Hardly Working, Bo pulls
his dancing partner (SanDee Pitnick) into a 180degree reverse shot
across the cut. This sort of cut is not, of course, Lewiss invention, but
it takes on a heightened value in his work because of the importance of
a range of figures linked to the reverse field and the physical place of
the camera in his films.
The most extreme reversal in Lewiss work is the ending of The
Patsy, in which the reverse field of every film shotthe field containing
the camera and the crewis finally revealed. The tossed-off quality of
the ending (parrying Ina Balins calling him a complete nut, Lewis
remembers that hes having nuts and whipped cream for lunch and
leads the cast and crew off the set, as his remarks trail off rather than
reaching a neat period) perhaps acknowledges the impossibility of
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ending: the subject of this implicitly autobiographical film being still

alive, the film cannot close (as Lewis says, The people in the theater
know I aint gonna die; ... Im gonna make more movies, so I couldnt
diethe latter is also a statement of the endlessness of art). This
ultimate reverse field of The Patsy is a place of seeming nonexistence
and unimportance; even in being shown it appears less real than the
space that its showing reveals to have been fictional. Nothing matters
here (the stakes of the narrative having already been twice denied,
first in Ellens refusal of the wife role in Stanleys proposed romantic
couple, second in Stanleys putative death by falling), so Lewis erases
the space in the act of showing it: a way of remaining discreet about
his own activity as director.
Oedipus Is No Problem
The its-a-movie ending of The Patsy gives a specific and extreme form
to an ambiguity that persists throughout Lewiss cinema. One of the most
revolutionary aspects of The Bellboy is its reintroduction of the fantastic
within a representational context defined (within and outside the film,
by its genre) as naturalistic. The periodic appearances of the Stan Laurel
surrogate played by Bill Richmond, the inexplicable powers that enable
Stanley to fulfill impossible tasks like setting up hundreds of chairs in a
hall or landing an airplane, and the fantasy conducting sequence are all
instances in which the naturalisticindeed, documentary-likesurface
of the film is suddenly disturbed. Lewiss predilection for the fantastic
survives in his later work: for example, in the Miss Cartilage sequence
in The Ladies Man, the scenes with the clown hand-puppet and Magnolia in The Errand Boy, and the freezing of Thors men into animal
postures in The Big Mouth. These incursions of the fantastic point to a
basic ambiguity in Lewiss films: the difficulty of determining what mode
of representation is in force at a given moment. It is often difficult to
determine the context in which a scene should be understood.
This uncertainty regarding context is related to another kind of ambiguity that can make watching Lewiss films uncomfortable. His work
is full of scenes of direct or near-direct addresses to the audience, of
confessions (The Nutty Professor, Three on a Couch); scenes of crisis in
which characters find themselves alone, deprived of external recognition
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Jerry Lewis
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or support, and summon the strength to come to terms with their own
natures and abilities and carry on (The Patsy, One More Time, Which
Way to the Front?); scenes in which people affirm to each other the value
of simple goodness or niceness (The Ladies Man, The Big Mouth). At
the middle of the scathing depiction of show-business style and culture
in The Patsy, Ellen speaks for feeling and for the heart: Weve been
happy working as a family, and we hate the thought of breaking up.
Ellen has the articulateness about feelings that is common to Lewiss
heroines. Talking with Stanley backstage at the TV studio, she evokes
the tender, nice things, the things we wish would still prevail, but since
they dont, we try to bring them back by remembering. She concludes:
The sweet things and the good things arent always the things that make
us better people. ... If we can carry on after a bad thing happens, then
weve grown up some. Suzie in The Big Mouth speaks with the same
purified vocabulary: Youre good, youre nice.
The forthrightness of such talk may make Lewiss films appear mawkish, easily readable, and bathetic. Yet the films harbor a deep uncertainty
that always stands ready to undermine what seem to be their own most
firmly held values and basic imperatives, even as Lewiss insistence on
sentiment threatens to become a parody of obviousness. Lewiss parodic
impulse takes the form of a sententiousness that not only has no fear of
parodying itself but doesnt even worry whether the parody is understood
as parody: ambiguity is ever-present in Lewis, at least as a threat.
Consider the paradoxical romanticism of the beautifully lit highangle close shot (highlights glittering in the pupils) of the studio singer
(Rita Hayes) who overdubs Lover in The Errand Boy. For a magical
moment, the scene opposes her belief in the song to the falseness of
the scene on the screen. It is not clear what reaction Lewis wants this
image to elicit, just as in The Nutty Professor, it is hard to tell how we
are meant to react to the diffusing filter that transforms the close-up
of Stella. Does Lewis offer the distortion of Kelps vision as an object
for laughter, or is he claiming this way of seeing Stella as his own and,
as author of the film, challenging us to accept or reject his vision? The
uncertainty is radical and uncomfortable. For every impulse toward affirmation, Lewis demonstrates an equally strong impulse toward negation.
The Lover dubbing sequence in The Errand Boy confirms this when,
after the professional singer finishes her successful take, the redubbed
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scene, during a public preview, turns out to have been re-redubbed, as

Mortys offkey screeching issues from the onscreen actresss mouth.
In the scene of Elizabeth and Chris dancing to a slow ballad in Three
on a Couch, the composition, the camera movement, the singers direct
address to the couple, and above all Janet Leighs performance characterize this dance as an idyllic moment of understanding and togetherness.
Throughout the long take, Chriss back is to the camera, which stays on
Elizabeths face. When the dance is over and Elizabeth returns to the
table, Chris remains on the dance floor: though standing, he is asleep, and
we realize that he may have been asleep throughout the dance without
Elizabeths knowledge. The final joke retroactively throws into question
the romanticism of the scene without invalidating itLewisian ambiguity
remains in force at all levels.
Lewis ridicules or ignores much of what is often sentimentalized:
starting with the family and the family home, which become targets
of satirical attack in all his films, and moving on to the paternalisms
of capital and nation (as in Which Way to the Front?). When, in The
Ladies Man, Mrs. Wellenmelon attempts to manipulate Herbert into
staying on as her houseboy by pretending to weep, or when Herbert tells
Katie of his traumatic graduation day (a story that reduces her to tears)
and of the death of Marvin the goldfish (an event in which Herberts
continued emotional investment puzzles even Katie), Lewiss critique
of sentimentality could not be clearer.
Yet, in the same film, Lewis provides a naturalistic, muted treatment of the relationship (which never becomes a love story) between
the isolated Fay and the compassionate Herbert. At one point, there is
a beautiful fadeout on a medium close shot of Fay practicing dancing:
she continues her dance after Walter Scharfs score has reached a sting
and as the final note dies. The delicacy of this moment is of a kind that
Lewis knows how to bring out through the fadeout. We find it again in
The Family Jewels in the scene that fades out on Willard listening alone
to the record of This Diamond Ring (a then-recent pop hit by Lewiss
son, Gary Lewis), and in The Errand Boy at the end of Mortys encounter
with Magnolia. Such moments introduce into their films something that
functions less as sentimentality than as a naturalistic (and noncomedic)
softening of the harshness of the surrounding comedy.
In The Errand Boy, Morty tells Magnolia of his desire, while he was
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in his native New Jersey, to go to Hollywood to be closer to the movies:

I guess it wasnt uncommon with me like with a lot of other guys my age
that liked movies. ... So when I got here I realized I wasnt any closer
to it than when I was in New Jersey. And as you know, when youre far
away from something you cant get to it. Thats not quite half as bad as
when youre close to that something and you cant get to it. Right? Here,
Lewisian sentimentality is explicitly pathosthat is, distance. Mortys
confession turns this satire of Hollywood in The Errand Boy inside out,
making it into a statement of longing for an inner truth of Hollywood
probably the same inner truth that attracted Lewis himself when he was
a movie lover, long before he became a moviemaker (see my interview
with him in this book)that becomes paradoxically less accessible the
closer he gets to its origin. Andrew Sarris criticizes Lewiss sentimentality as sanctimonious on the grounds that Lewis is guilty of playing the
innocent and of failing to acknowledge a contradiction between, on
one side, his own sophistication and professional knowingness about
show business and, on the other side, what Sarris calls his simpering
simple-mindedness on the screen and the conformist, sentimental,
and banal messages of his films (24244). Far from failing to acknowledge this contradiction, however, The Errand Boy makes it as glaring
as possible by allowing Morty to speak of his distance from his dream
of cinema. The Errand Boy is neither a celebration nor an evisceration
of Hollywood; it is a mourning of it, a lament for its disappearance.
If Lewiss films admittedly contain much of the kind of moralizing
that Sarris objects to (as when, in The Family Jewels, Donna asserts that
Willard should be her father, or when, near the end of The Ladies Man,
Fay criticizes the other girls for trying to keep Herbert from leaving
the house), they also contain the antidote to it, in such moments as the
parodic moralizing of Leo Durocher in The Errand Boy (Be kind and
be sweet). In Cracking Up, Warren, doing his job as parking valet, is
entrusted by Sammy Davis Jr. with his car. After Davis goes off, having
asked Warren to treat the car with care, Warren, alone in the frame,
simpers, What a wonderful human being. Those who have heard Lewis, as host of the Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon or on a TV
talk show, speak of Davis (his close friend) in similar terms may perceive
this line as a conscious self-parody and an invitation to share in a point
of view from which such encomiums, delivered by one show-business
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figure about another, appear glib and empty. Is Lewis disavowing the
sentiment? Criticizing Davis? Or himself? What, if anything, is being
suggested about the character of Warren here? When Lewis faces the
camera to praise Davis, does Warren even exist as a character? Lewiss
films constantly put in question their own implied underlying meanings.
Because the context he sets up is basically a show-business contextin
which persons and their meanings are always constantly performedthe
possibility always exists for a second- (or a third-, or a fourth-) degree
reading of meanings as simulated or disavowed.
There are few unconditionals in Lewiss sentimentality. Children
should be loved and protected (The Family Jewels, Hardly Working),
but they can also be labeled monsters by the Lewis character himself (The Errand Boy), with whom they may have a hostile, adversarial
relationship (as does the young son of Bos girlfriend, Millie [Deanna
Lund], in Hardly Working). Sentimentality has to do with protecting
things as they are, with not growing up and growing old, with permanent
childhooda condition of which Lewis is undoubtedly the greatest poet
in American cinema. This is why In Dreams They Run (1970), Lewiss
episode for the TV series The Bold Ones, is so startling: it faces the death
of a child (in the image of an empty bed) with blunt directness. Three
on a Couch is a parable, a kind of bachelor-party farewell to childhood.
The figure of the male psychiatric patient sucking on a pacifier in the
opening-titles sequence (an action that Lewis repeats in Which Way to
the Front?) externalizes the limitations of childishness.
A Little Fun to Match the Sorrow (1965), Lewiss episode for the
hospital TV series Ben Casey, opposes the compulsive joking of a neurosurgeon-in-training, Green (Lewis), to the grimness of the resident surgeon, Casey (Vincent Edwards). Green pretends that he is merely trying to
insert some humanity and humor into the work; to Casey, lightheartedness
is dangerous. There is no obvious way to reconcile the two positions, and
Lewis, as director, embraces neither. Except with Buddy Love in The
Nutty Professor and Uncle Everett in The Family Jewels, Lewis has never
gone so far in criticizing his own characters as in A Little Fun to Match
the Sorrowa criticism that is all the more striking in that Green is close
in many ways to Lewiss typical lovable Idiot characters (and not atypical
like Buddy and Everett). In a disturbing scene, Green, unable to tell his
estranged girlfriend (Dianne Foster) that her sick fathers prognosis is
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Jerry Lewis
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poor, tries to dodge her questions and seems about to break into typical
Lewisian double talk, only to receive the womans sharp rebuke. If Lewiss
work can be called a flight from reality, from adulthood, and from death
into comedy, A Little Fun to Match the Sorrow constitutes the most
brutal and self-contradicting arrest of this flight.
The Big Mouth, a film of protest, is (with Which Way to the Front?)
perhaps the least sentimental of Lewiss films. The Big Mouth continues the movement away from childhood and into adulthood that Lewis
started in Three on a Couch. Like Chris Pride, Gerald Clamson does not
have childhood, or childlikeness, for an alibi. He is a solitary, isolated
figure, with no family and no past, defined only by his profession and his
hobby. More than any other Lewis character, he is a person with no qualities and no strengths (and also no weaknesses)in short, no character to
draw on. And Lewis asks for him none of the fond indulgence he seems
to expect the viewer to bestow on his characters in The Errand Boy or
The Patsy (unlike them, Clamson is not inept or accident-prone). Some
of the same things can be said of Byers in Which Way to the Front?;
his great wealth makes him an even less obvious recipient of automatic
sympathy than Clamson.
Clamsons normality and undistinguishedness put the emphasis of
the film elsewhere than on the feelings of humiliation or inadequacy
that haunt the Lewis characters in The Ladies Man, The Nutty Professor,
Which Way to the Front?, Hardly Working, and Cracking Up. With
a certain austerity, The Big Mouth sets out to define what remains of
the human in a mechanized, programmed world. In scene after scene,
The Big Mouth exposes a society devoted to annihilation: Thor strafing, then torpedoing the beach, leaving a huge hole (from the bottom
of which Valentines voice resonates); the hotel manager and his men
enumerating the various ways they will kill Clamson; the gangsters
aiming their guns at Clamson from various directions; Fong gloating
over his horrific bubbling vat. The film takes all this violence somewhat
seriouslythat is, not purely as a subject for entertainment. It stages
moments that clash violently with the expected style and themes of an
innocuous comedy: unexpectedly, Fong has one of his men killed in
a horrible manner (though offscreen); we might also be surprised by
the real blood leaking from Valentines skindiver suit (but as Godard
said, Not blood, red).
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The Big Mouth is made up entirely of flight, of escape. Several great

figures that proclaim a triumph over gravity organize the space of the
film: first, the long-take helicopter shot at the beginning of the film that
takes off, describes a short curve, then redescends; later, the movements of Clamson upward, onto roofs and into the air (escaping from
the hotel manager, bouncing off the tennis-court net, fleeing from his
adversaries). In the final sequence at Sea World, a veritable poem on
escape, Clamson tries to hide in plain sight by assuming the disguise
of a kabuki performer (trying to white himself out with the white face
makeup); then, fallen into the crooks clutches, he tries vainly to escape
by making himself small, low, and imperceptible (after the fashion of
Kelps father in the flashback scene in The Nutty Professor); finally, he
suddenly simply disappears from Fongs laboratory. In a sense, Clamson
is continuing the movement of his normal life, which is itself an escape
into the nonentity of the functionary, the quiet man, a zero degree of
humanity (the same route that Bo attempts to take, without success, in
Hardly Working). The Big Mouth defines the human being as a target,
someone being chased: movement, escape, becoming imperceptible.
(Compare, in the party sequence of Three on a Couch, Chriss anguished
attempts to avoid having any of the four women he is involved with see
him with any other.) Clamson is also a figure who goes too far and gives
society more than it demands of him (just as Stanley in The Bellboy
does). In doing so, he exposes the absurdity of its demands and rebels
through an excess of conformity. (This is the principle of, for example,
Kelps agreeing with Warfield in The Nutty Professor when the latter
declares their conversation to be finished.)
The outward conditions of the plot of each of Lewiss films are only
mechanisms to let his character assume various disguises and to confront
him again with the objects that have precipitated his flight. The hero
rarely overcomes these objects directly; his triumph consists instead
(as in The Ladies Man) in a trying-out, in the mode of play and fantasy,
of various possible attitudes toward them. Still, in The Big Mouth, the
anguish felt by the protagonist, or rather the success of the film at conveying his anguish, is heightened rather than diminished by his showing
something like coolness in his attempts to bring his relations with the
crooks onto a more normal social plane. This is in sharp contrast to such
comedies as the Crosby and Hope films, in which Hopes wisecracks and
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departures from the frame of the fictional narrative imply his characters
mastery of the narrative situation and the absence of real danger. In The
Big Mouth, the danger remains realthough, of course, fictional.
Such generic discontinuity is a constant feature of Lewiss work. The
long transformation sequence in The Nutty Professor is handled as it
might be in an odd, but straight, horror movie. In Which Way to the
Front?, the flashback of Hackle (Jan Murray) backstage at a nightclub,
menaced by thugs, is played straight and could be from a serious, dark
film on the sordid life of an unsuccessful nightclub comedian. In general,
the first half of Which Way to the Front? is not very funny; it is not until
the second half, with Byerss encounters with the German language and
the Nazi enemy, that Lewis strikes comic gold. Fairly long stretches of
The Family Jewels and Hardly Working and, perhaps, nearly all of One
More Time are also lacking in humor. One of my premises is that Lewiss
work creates an impure, shifting context within which such a lack need
not be accounted a flaw. Changes in tone occur constantly in Lewiss
comedies. In the long flashback of the high-school dance in The Patsy,
he refuses to mitigate the pain of Stanleys humiliation. In The Family
Jewels, the sour clown Uncle Everett and Donnas depressed reaction
to him are played on a naturalistic level. In The Errand Boy, Mortys
encounter with Magnolia steers the film away from slapstick and toward
a low-key existential meditation, with overtones of the possible beginning
of a romantic relationship.
Generic discontinuity pervades the history of American film comedy. Chaplins filmsfrom such spoofs as Burlesque on Carmen (1916)
through the growing importance of pathos and emotion in his mature
workprovide the model that was most important to Lewis. Such Martin and Lewis films as Taurogs The Stooge (1952) mix comedy with sentiment and seriousness; in Dean and Me, Lewis writes of his realization
that artistic maturity depends upon this combinationa realization that
he dates to the 1954 production of Joseph Pevneys Three-Ring Circus
(significantly, the film that marked the first serious rift between Lewis
and Martin), although he surely had inklings of it when he was making
Thats My Boy in 1951: The one thing that Charlie [Chaplin] hadin
spadeswas something Id barely tapped into: pathos. Great comedy,
in my mind, always goes hand in hand with great sadness: This is the
grand Circle of Life, the mixture of laughter and tears. You can be funny
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without tapping into strong emotion, but the humor is more superficial.
Funny without pathos is a pie in the face. And a pie in the face is funny,
but I wanted more (Lewis and Kaplan 211).
Lewiss incorporation of pathos often involves structuring a film around
a therapeutic theme: a character needs to be cured of some affliction or
has a problemat least partly internalthat needs to be solved. The
therapeutic theme is prevalent throughout Lewiss films, including several he did not direct, such as Thats My Boy, The Delicate Delinquent,
Cinderfella, and The Disorderly Orderly. Although the therapeutic structure vanishes completely from The Bellboy (which treats neither Stanleys incompetence nor his muteness as issues for therapy) and becomes
submerged in The Ladies Man (in which Herberts problemhis fear of
womenis never solved), it resurfaces in The Nutty Professor. Starting
with its central premiseKelps transformation into LoveThe Nutty
Professor is concerned with forms of self-therapy. The therapeutic role
Love plays for Kelp is also emphasized in Loves dealings with others.
Encouraging Warfield to declaim Hamlets To be or not to be soliloquy
while standing on the table in his office, Buddy tells him: You know its
the best thing in the world for you. Earlier, he kisses Stella and says,
Thats good for you. The message Love brings to all (and it is echoed
again in the intrusion of Kelps father into Kelps classroom at the end) is
one of healing.
Though Lewis clearly feels (and expects the audience to feel) more
affection for Kelp, it is obvious that Buddy Love is loved, too: the close-up
of Stella looking at him as he sings That Old Black Magic is eloquent,
as is the enthusiasm with which the crowd responds to his performance.
Later, in the parked car, Buddy tells Stella, You know darn well that
nothing delights us more than being enjoyed, appreciated, or just plain
liked by someone, right? (see fig. 7). The addiction to this delight and
the pain that accompanies its withdrawal account for Buddys maudlin
negativity on his second appearance, drunk, in the Purple Pit: I think
Ill do a tune that Im going to record for Poverty Records. Theyre the
only ones thatll have me (Poverty Records is the name of the company
for which Stanley Belt records his hit single in The Patsy).
In Three on a Couch, Lewis and Janet Leigh suggest that Elizabeths
devotion to her patients may be motivated as much by her own attachment to the role she plays in their lives as by her interest in helping
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Jerry Lewis
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Figure 7. Stella Stevens and Jerry Lewis

in The Nutty Professor.
them. Robert Benayoun, in noting that the Elizabeths problem exemplifies for Lewis the key idea of professionally making people happy
(142), points out the central metaphor of the film. On the surface, the
screenplay of Three on a Couch seems loaded against Elizabeth (indeed,
against women) in defining the three patients problem as an aversion
to men and proposing the end of this aversion as marking their cure. To
see the film from this point of view is to share Ben and Chriss implicit
attitude that the three patients problems are not deeply serious and
that Elizabeths concern for the women is misplaced and excessive. Seen
more deeply, Three on a Couch becomes a film about the need for love
and a restatement, in different terms and on a different plane, of the
theme of The Nutty Professor. The problems of the three women are,
for Lewis, serious (serious within the world of comedy and capable of
resolution in comic terms), and he presents them as such. Through the
mounting strain on Chris as he tries to carry out his plot and through the
unraveling of the plot when the four women in his life come together,
Three on a Couch demonstrates, contrary to its ostensible message, the
absurdity of the (culturally encouraged) presumption that a man could
be the solution to the problems of all women, emphasizing (like The
Nutty Professor) the anxiety that results for someone who tries to act
on the basis of that presumption.
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A critique of the therapeutic/normative role of male sexuality, Three

on a Couch is also a comment on its time and its society. Chriss constant
smoking and drinking (and Ringos unlit cigar), which outdo Buddy Loves
indulgence in these habits in The Nutty Professor, suggest a parody of and
a rebellion against the adult image Lewis felt compelled to adapt at this
stage of his career. The implied derision of psychiatry is a sixties notation,
as is the implicit sexism of Bens plan (which is echoed by the tumbling
of copies of Playboy from a diplomats briefcase onto the street). Shortly
before Three on a Couch, Lewis had played a subordinate part in another
farce with which its plot shares a number of similarities, Boeing Boeing,
starring Tony Curtis as an American reporter in Paris who conducts affairs with three different flight attendants while trying to keep them from
meeting or finding out about each other. Quintessential Sixtiesiana, Boeing Boeing would fit comfortably among the films that Geoffrey OBrien
cites in Dream Time as paralleling the postJFK assassination national
mood shift to hysterical lightheadedness: The Pink Panther, A Shot in
the Dark, Kiss Me Stupid, The Patsy (sitting rather oddly among this
company), The World of Henry Orient, Whats New Pussycat?, Lord Love
a Duck, The Swinger, Dont Make Waves, and Tashlins Caprice. According to OBrien, these films aimed at frothy exuberance but were closer
to the half-giddy, half-sickened disjointedness of a bunch of compulsive
partygoers beginning to run out of steam. OBrien accurately recognizes
in this cycle a reflection of sixties modernity, jagged and permanently
out of kilter, obsessively dedicated to the pursuit of fun and the religion
of the fleeting instant, characterized by an edgy failure to sustain any
emotional note for long (30). If Three on a Couch is Lewiss approximation
of the mid-sixties sex comedy, it is also his critique and overcoming of it,
his correction of Boeing Boeing. Chris refrains from exploiting his three
conquests sexually (Please tell her [Elizabeth] I was always a gentleman,
he begs them at the end). Chris, too, remains a Lewisian innocenta
more mature one for whom sexuality is no longer innocent and who thus
must make a conscious choice to maintain his innocence.
Discomfort with sexualityand femininityis visible in much of
Lewiss work (as Benayoun and other French critics pointed out to him,
to his professed bewilderment). Lewis regularly confronts feminine attractiveness with its reverse, as in The Bellboy when, after having slimmed
down while staying at the hotel, Miss Hartung bloats up again to her
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previous enormous weight from eating the candy that Stanley gives her as
a going-away present. Of the women in The Errand Boy, the closest to a
fully realized and sympathetic character and an acceptable erotic object is
Magnolia, the puppet; the glamorous and sexually available Serina (Felicia
Atkins), the movie star who attaches Morty to herself at the Hollywood
premiere, is rejected as an automaton, a not fully conscious being. Serina
is another incarnation of one of Lewiss most hallucinatory creations, the
model in The Bellboy who, moving in her sleep with an involuntary unbridledness, attaches herself to Stanley while sprawling on a couch in the
hotel lobby. The eroticism of this image is inseparable from the womans
dependence and unconsciousnesstraits that also characterize the three
patients in Three on a Couch. Nevertheless, Three on a Couch enables
Lewis to achieve a certain balance in his view of women. The film inverts
the premise of The Ladies Man: instead of a man fleeing from women,
Lewis shows three women fleeing from men. What remains constant is
the figure of the man being embodied by a single actor, Lewis (albeit a
Lewis who, characteristically, divides himself into several personalities),
whereas the female figure is multiplied, whether she is conceived as the
object or the subject of the obsession.
Lewiss cinema rejects the privileged structures of psychoanalysis: the
Oedipus complex and the patriarchal family. If mother figures are invariably negative in Lewiss films (for example, Lewis in drag as Herberts
mother in The Ladies Mana figure so repellent that Herbert turns
her photo away from the camera; see also the terrifying, overpowerful
mothers in The Nutty Professor and Which Way to the Front?), father
figures are viewed no more positively: they are usually too aggressive, like
the mailroom manager (Stanley Adams) in The Errand Boy and Frank
in Hardly Working. In Which Way to the Front?, Byers kills the father
(Kesselring) by impersonating him and taking his place, as Warren will
do at the end of Cracking Up. Rather than merely marking the renewal
of a never ending cycle, these acts are escapes from the cycle. In In
Dreams They Run, young Davey escapes, too: he decides to leave his
biological parents to join the larger family of muscular-dystrophy sufferers and health-care professionals at the hospital.
At the end of The Nutty Professor, after following his son in taking
the formula and transforming himself, the father goes beyond the son,
becoming worse than him in commercializing the formula and assum An American Dream
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ing a salesmans role (whereas Buddy Love at least entertained people

with his singing). Similarly, at the end of Cracking Up, the psychiatrist
becomes a minor version of Warren. These imitations of the son by
the father represent decisive victories over Oedipus. At the end of The
Errand Boy, passing along the lineup of his former studio superiors in
his Cadillac convertible limousine, Morty repeats his name-learning
exercise from earlier in the film, this time with Mr. Babewosentall; but
now, at the end of the syllable-by-syllable enunciation, it is the bearer
of the name himself who mangles the whole name, making himself the
butt of the joke and turning himself into an idiot in the presence of
the self-assured star Morty. A father who, imitating the sons linguistic
troubles, fails to pronounce his own name: surely this is the most ignoble
version of the father.
In Which Way to the Front?, the ease with which Byers substitutes
himself for Kesselring (after dispatching several of the latters subordinates), no less than the ease with which he carries off his impersonation
despite seemingly having no competence in the German language (by a
movie convention that Lewis characteristically flaunts, the German officers all speak English), suggests Lewiss derision of the Oedipal scenario.
It is, after all, no big deal to insert oneself into language, to displace the
father and assume his name.
Home does not exist in Lewiss world. His biography offers an
explanation for this absence: his parents, vaudeville performers, were
constantly on the road. In The Family Jewels, whose story can be described as a childs search for a home, Donna and Willard appear to live
in hotels, and at the end of the film it is not clear where they will go. The
boxlike spaces of Lewiss films are never spaces of domestic comfort but
stages for performance. Karl Marx writes that the worker is at home
when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home
(110). In Lewiss first three films, which are all about work, only in The
Ladies Man do we briefly see where the Lewis character sleeps. (In later
films, he provides more glimpses of his characters intimate lives: the
bed scene in The Nutty Professor, the hotel room scene in The Family
Jewels, and a few scenes in Bos bedroom in Hardly Working.) In The
Bellboy, the bell captain tells his staff: What you do after working hours
is our business. If home is a space for the private individual, there is
no home for the bellboys. Near the end of the film, the hotel manager
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Novak, denouncing Stanley at a union meeting of the bellboys, says,

Ive given you a home away from home, and this is the way you repay
me. The home away from home is a palacea parody of the idea of
home as a place of comfort scaled to its occupants. In The Errand Boy,
the back of his jacket collar impaled on a hook, Morty must spend the
night upright among a group of mannequins (until in the morning a prop
assistant mistakes him for a dummy and starts to carry him away).
If home is that from which one is exiled and to which one cannot
return, the problem for the individual becomes that of learning to love
this state of permanent flight and making it the condition for a greater
universality. Lewis is always skeptical about, if not opposed to, a merely
personal quest for self-knowledge (at the end of The Nutty Professor,
Kelp is unaware that Stella has purchased two bottles of his fathers
tonic: it is a secret she shares with the viewer while winking at the
camera). Advised by the psychiatrist Karl Menninger that he should
refrain from undergoing analysis, Lewis knew why without needing
to be told: If I find out whats bothering me, I wont be funny any
more (qtd. in Benayoun 143). Show business constitutes, for Lewis, an
alternate psychoanalysis, a therapeutic sphere in which he acts out his
obsessions in public and transcends them (see the confession scene at
the prom in The Nutty Professor). In several films, Lewis depicts show
business as an alternate family. Herberts progress in The Ladies Man
takes him from his real, triangular family to the surrogate family of Mrs.
Wellenmelons collection of would-be starlets. In The Patsy, Ellen calls
the group formed by the handlers a family. The forming of the private
army in Which Way to the Front? resembles the forming of a theatrical
troupe as much as it does the forming of a surrogate family.
The link between therapy and comedy is one of the mainsprings of
Lewiss work, from at least as early as the partnership with Martin. Echoing sociological interpretations of Martin and Lewiss ascent in anxious
postwar America, Lewis remarks: What we really were, in an age of
Freudian self-realization, was the explosion of the show-business id
(Lewis and Kaplan 7). One of Lewiss innovations is making the showbusiness id the instrument and the vehicle of a superior alternate model
of self-realization to that of psychoanalysis. From the magic potion
the Hollywood studios are said (at the beginning of The Errand Boy)
to brew to Kelps formula in The Nutty Professor is but a short step.
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How to Undo Things with Words

A motif in Lewis is the magic word, password, or order-word5 that
starts the plot by summoning the characters to assume their places in it.
The word Who?, uttered by an exasperated Caryl Ferguson (Everett
Sloane) in The Patsy as he ponders finding an unknown person and
making him into a star, sets the plot in motion. Similarly, in The Errand
Boy, Morty is chosen as someone nobody knows. The will in The Family Jewels, the plan to cure the three women in Three on a Couch,
and the dying gangsters exhortation in The Big Mouth are all examples
of order-words that start the plots of the films (whereas the title word
Smorgasbord magically stops the plot of a film better known under its
video release title, Cracking Up). In Which Way to the Front?, the magic
word, uttered by the recruiting officer (Myron Healey), is rejection
the same word that resonates, unspoken, behind the graduation-day sequence of The Ladies Man, in which the sight of his beloved in the arms
of another man sends Herbert on his flight, and behind the laying-off of
Bo at the beginning of Hardly Working, in which it is not an individual,
a government, or a company but an entire economic and cultural system
that issues the damning rejection of the circus employees and of the
circus as a form of mainstream entertainmenta rejection that the film
and its hero will turn around.
The whole of The Bellboy is a series of instructions, each one giving
rise to a block of cinema that is not only the carrying out of the instruction but the depiction of a breakdown that results from its carrying out
(told to take everything out of the trunk of a guests Volkswagen Beetle,
Stanley shows up at its owners room bringing the motor), the realization
of a possibility that the order (which is explicitly concerned only with
the single correct outcome it envisions) contains and suppresses. The
Lewisian block is a kind of deprogramming, a loosening of the potential
for chaos in the order. It is a contradictory, paradoxical way of refusing
the order (and also the order of orders, the regime of the order, this
way of determining the potentials of language). Orders are never merely
given and accepted; they have to be processed and understoodand
in the process, subverted. In The Errand Boy, we hear Mortys garbled
attempt to repeat Mr. Paramutuals instructions (take wife to medical
building, get car washed) over a medium shot of Morty driving off in the
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car; by the time he reaches the car wash in the next scene, the two parts
of the order have evidently become conflated, so that the wife is going to
get washed with the car; and what was not explicit in the ordersecure
the top of the convertible before having it washedis merely ignored.
The literal repetition of an order is no guarantee that it has been understood: in Which Way to the Front?, Bland (Steve Franken), reduced
to a robot or a moron, repeats his wifes commands verbatimso that,
as when children try to be annoying, personal pronouns get applied to
the wrong person (Make me a sandwich. Make me a sandwich. No,
make me a sandwich. No, make me a sandwich).
Failure characterizes the receivers side of the communication act
in Lewiss films. In The Big Mouth, Clamson and Suzie talk at cross
purposes in his hotel suite. Misunderstanding his litany of phrases such
as frustrated, cant stop thinking about it, youre the first one this
week (who would listen to him), and I cant get it off of my mind
(his problem), the offended Suzie retorts: Why dont you try a cold
shower? The scene exists for no other reason than to demonstrate the
failure of understanding, primordial in Lewiss universe.
Like Stanley in The Bellboy, Morty in The Errand Boy distinguishes
himself by his propensity for subversion and disturbance, for liberating
the fulfillment of an order from the issuing of an order. Mortys misadventures at the studio expose the mechanics of filmmaking as an impersonal
process in which anonymous and interchangeable people labor to glorify
unimpressive stars and antiquated stories. An entire production system,
and an entire cultural system, function on automatic pilot. Lewiss criticism takes on not only filmmaking but the collective unconscious. Attending a premiere, the starlet Serina blithely mistakes Morty for her escort
for the evening and carries on an extended one-sided conversation with
him as if they had been intimates for years. In the script-typing room,
Morty, by tripping over a garbage can, triggers a cataclysm of tumbling
pages and shuffled genres (the viewer is left to imagine the film that
would result if the script were collated and shot).
The mere act of issuing an order is so potent, so threatening, that the
person to whom it is issued, if that person is played by Jerry Lewis, may
rush off to complete it before hearing what the order is. Already familiar
with this danger, the bell captain (Bob Clayton) in The Bellboy issues an
instruction that expects to be misunderstood rather than followed: he
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points at a steamer trunk, and Stanley, following the line of his point, assumes hes being asked to fetch the trunk itself, which he does, with great
effort, only to be told (by the man who has been standing frozen all the
while, his pointing arm extended) that what was required was only the hat
box that was on top of the trunk (see fig. 8). Similarly, in The Ladies Man,
Gainsborough says, Ive come to see my girl, and Herbert, accompanied
by a cartoon sound effect, dashes out of the frame, leaving Gainsborough
waiting for Herbert to return to get the girls name. The bell captains is
a false instruction, like Ballings instructions to Bo in Hardly Working
(which Bo, after first claiming not to understand them, mouths along with
Balling as the latter heavily repeats them, with additional details)the
true content of the command is its demonstration of the superiority of
the commanding person. In another sense, the bell captains command
resembles Valentines initial order to Clamson in The Big Mouth. As during each pause for breath his listener starts dashing off, Valentine gasps:
Hurry! Wait! All goals are like this: we are sent after them in a hurry but
also told to wait, not to go too fast: time is dual, both urgent and extended;
contradiction is built into the demand at the beginning.
A pedantic language often characterizes the order. In The Errand
Boy, the needlessly detailed way Mortys mailroom manager describes the
things he is to carrypackages, envelopes, papers, and other matter
Figure 8. The steamer trunk in The Bellboy:

Bob Clayton and Jerry Lewis.
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makes it clear that there is a text behind the command and that the person
has been reduced to being the loudspeaker of the text. Early in The Patsy,
Ferguson says to Stanley: We know all we need to know, and all you need
to find out is what we tell you. The discourse of the experts and bosses
is complete, unchangeable, self-contained, and timeless. What you do
during working hours, the bell captain tells his men in The Bellboy, is
our business. And what you do after working hours is our business. The
stress on our in the second sentence, instead of highlighting a contrast
in meaning between the two sentences, becomes a parodic sign of the
ownership of language that makes all issuing of commands tautological
and thereby undoes itself.
As Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari write, The order bears always
and already on orders, which is why the order is redundancy (95). Lewis unfolds redundancy for its own sake, as redundancyin The Ladies
Man, Herberts account to Katie of his fateful graduation-day discovery
of his beloveds infidelity triggers a flashback repetition of the scene
(which we have seen only ten minutes before). This repetition discloses
nothing new but only confirms the obsessive nature of Herberts relation
to the scene (and, in a wider sense, the obsessional character that all
narrative possesses for Lewis).
Language itself is redundancy in Lewiss work. Characters repeat
themselves or repeat what they have just heard. In The Errand Boy, Mr.
Sneak compulsively repeats the words of his boss, Mr. Paramutual. At
some moments of Which Way to the Front?, the only function of Byerss
three sidekicks is merely to parrot, each in his turn, Byerss words. Lewiss
characters speak in ways that call the communicative and referential functions of language into question. Communication is endlessly discussed as
a possibility, an event, or a limit, as in the classic exchange that concludes
Kelps visit to the office of Dr. Warfield early in The Nutty Professor:
warfield: Im sure that we wont have to have another little talk like
this again. Am I correct in assuming this?
kelp: Oh, uh, without question, youre absolutelyuh, yes, well never
have to correct our talk. Uh, we wont ever speak. Ah, that is, well never
have to talk again. We just never will discuss talking. Uh, we shouldnt
really converse about speaking.
warfield: Professor, our discussion has come to an end.
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The concept/model wont talk inspires in Kelp a series of revisions,

the inadequacy of which he recognizes as soon as he produces them.
Kelp understands what is being discussed, the signified, to be talking
itself, while Warfields intended meaning (that since Kelp will obey his
command and desist from chemistry experiments in class, it will be unnecessary for the two men to talk again on this particular topic) disappears behind Kelps restatements. This is a way of parodying and undoing
authoritarian meaningthe command implicit in Warfields words and
in the hierarchical situation that Warfield has set up to his benefit (including the cushioned chair in which his guest slowly sinks)by paying
attention to expression. It is also more radical and thorough than that.
Kelps parody (uttered with a seeming innocuousness that serves as a
protective mask) reduces all language to a conversation about speaking.
If the theme of every utterance is always enunciation itself, the order is
undone in advance by the impossibility of executing it outside the circuit
of language.
In Hardly Working, during Bos interview in Franks office, Frank
asks, Now you say you never worked for the post office before? Bo,
his mouth filled with the doughnut he has been eating, replies with
an extended passage of gibberish. This way of answering the question
ridicules the idea that it can be or needs to be answered and furthermore casts into doubt whether a question has even been asked, whether
information could be exchanged or new information produced within
the ceremonial context of this interview.
There is a class of characters in Lewiss films who have been given
the voice and who are supposed to speak on behalf of the system or the
society and utter its truths: voices of authority. Examples include the
New York director in The Errand Boy, who pronounces authoritatively
on the unique brilliance of Mortys improvisation with a gargantuan
erupting champagne bottle; the supposed FBI man in The Big Mouth;
the recruiting officer in Which Way to the Front?; and the psychiatrist
in Cracking Up. Again and again a voice makes itself heard that comes
as if from the place of truth, where people are accepted or rejected,
declared okay or not okay.
To counter this authoritarianism of language, Lewis uses languagelessness and other kinds of antilanguage. In The Bellboy, Stanley is silent
because no one ever asked him to talk. (Compensating for his characters
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silence, the entirety of Lewiss film is an extremely sophisticated utterance

by its author; in Lewiss directorial debut, filmmaking becomes both a
substitute for and the privileged metaphor for speech.) Lewis revives the
premise that no one cares what his character has to say for The Big Mouth;
the pretext for the chain of zany happenings that befall Gerald Clamson
and those with whom he comes into contact is that, as the onscreen narrator of the film says, Most people are so completely wrapped up in
their own affairs that they arent really terribly interested in anything that
doesnt involve them. (The moral discerned by the offscreen narrator at
the end of The Bellboy: Youll never know the next guys story unless you
ask.) People are blocks that come into contact with other blocks without
becoming interested in or learning anything about each other. The Lewis
character, in numerous films, is the casualty of this noninterest and the
one for whom forming an attachment is still possible.
Lewis also undoes the tyranny of language through torrents of double
talk. Noninformation proliferates in his films. Rutherford, in Three on a
Couch, produces a lengthy, pseudoscientific discourse on Coleopteraa
chain of unfinished sentences that parodies learned discourse (like the
TV-repair monologue in Tashlins Its Only Money). Lewiss films abound
in improvised-sounding verbal routines, such as Uncle Bugsys stumbling monologues in The Family Jewels: Nobody finds where I hide
out. When I ... when I ... they aint gonna ... cause I really ... hide.
You have to really look to find me. In Which Way to the Front?, Byers,
in his disguise, flummoxes a German checkpoint guard with Germanaccented double talk. At such moments, language is halfway between
sound poetry and an absurdist and violent rejection of the possibility of
communication. The checkpoint guard requests the password from the
fake field marshal; Byers merely gets the guard to write the password
down, then gives him his same password back. Instead of a passage from
one to the other, a mirror movement has taken place.
Speechlessness, silence, or the other silence that is babbling: by these
means each film is further retarded and rerouted from its ostensible
goal. Or rather, by these means the true goal is revealed: goallessness
and play. In Which Way to the Front?, all that remains to attract the
man who has done everything are games of mimicry. In the boardroom
scene of The Errand Boy, Morty takes a break from his mail-delivery
rounds to do a pantomime impression of an executive issuing instruc An American Dream
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tions to his underlings, to the accompaniment of Count Basies Blues

in Hosss Flat, which seemingly plays in his head. (The use of music
in this wayneither naturalized within the diegesis nor part of the normal work of the score but purely a function of the onscreen characters
relationship with the cinematic apparatus at a privileged moment of the
narrativeextends a convention of the musical film.) Languagelessness
functions as a musical parody of authority and its orders, as the film
enters into a state of play and bliss.
Lewis is one of the main exponents in cinema of the tradition of
American Jewish verbal humor. All his films have a clear allegiance to
this traditionincluding The Bellboy, in which Lewis is silent for most
of his onscreen appearances. Stanleys silence functions as the obstinate
and defiant bearing of a mark of differencea Jewish ironic subversion. Which Way to the Front? is not only the most explicitly Jewish of
his films (deliriously so, in the great scene of Byers/Kesselrings meeting
with Hitler) but also the one in which Lewis asserts most aggressively
some of the Jewish aspects of his verbal art: the rough, braying timbres
intended to grate, the broken rhythms and musical cadences, creatively
mangled syntax, an obsessional insistence on the proper name (Byerss
incessant Schroeders), a blatant disrespect for the tyranny and prestige
of correct linguistic forms (see the scene in which Byers, trying to learn
German from a phonograph record, is not content merely to fracture
the phrases hes supposed to repeat but also mocks the punctiliousness
of the instructor and the sound of the German language). Playing Byers
playing Kesselring, Lewis unleashes and neutralizes the hidden violence
of speech (see fig. 9).
One of the pleasures of Lewiss films is his distinctive, Yiddish-inflected reinvention of the English language. Lewiss linguistic universe
is filled with gerunds. If its for drinking or lookingwell make it!
proclaims the sign outside the glass factory in Hardly Working. Stop
with the brushing, Jerry Lewis, a VIP guest at the Fontainebleau Hotel,
repeatedly tells a member of his staff in The Bellboy. The sequence in
which this line is spoken contains several other examples of Lewiss characteristic idiom, abrupt and peremptory in inventiveness: to forestall the
inevitable barrage of proffered lighters when he puts a cigarette in his
mouth, Lewis declares, Ill smoke it dry, Ill smoke it dry. His attempt
to get his staff to hold it becomes an elaborate, parodic address built
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Figure 9. The hidden violence of speech:

Paul Winchell, Dack Rambo, Jerry Lewis, John
Wood, Steve Franken, and Jan Murray
in Which Way to the Front?
around repetitions of that colloquialism. In Which Way to the Front?,

Byers dryly asks Finkel (John Wood) to report on his staffs behavior:
Are they holding it?
An apt general title for Lewiss cinema might be How to Undo Things
with Words. In The Errand Boy, the scene in which the mailroom manager gives the clerks their assignments is full of strange locutions (starting
with the managers introductory Now listen, and listen loud!), many of
them attempts to describe processes of understanding and cognition.
Dont yell or hit, Morty begs his boss, assuring him, Im going to listen to every clear and Ill do all the things. Signifying his grasp of the
principles of mail delivery, Morty says, If I see it says to go to a place,
Ill go there, but if I dont, then itllwont be clear. When the truculent
manager, with sublime irony or self-ignorance, calls himself a very patient man, Morty replies, I noticed before how terrific your mind is.
The manager goes on to give an account of his psyche: It takes a great
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deal for me to become unhinged for one reason or another. But, you see,
when my nerves tip me off that Im going to become unglued, thats when
I have to assert myself, do you understand that, Morty? Morty replies,
Youre about to smack people, right? The manager delivers one of those
speeches, frequent in Lewiss films, in which an elaborate explicitness
about emotional and psychological processes combines with an awkward
lay vocabulary (when my nerves tip me off that Im going to become
unglued is a magnificent phrase) to produce a hilarious and weird parody
of self-insight, filled with strangely distorted echoes of things picked up
somewhere or other in American mass culture.
For Lewis, words are a contagion. During the rehearsal of the Copa
Caf monologue in The Patsy, Stanley, between garbled attempts at
reciting the jokes that have been written for him, repeats fragments
that he picks up from the reactions of his handlers (he needs help),
who are being driven beyond their patience by his incompetence. The
scene hinges on a confusion of pronouns and of identity that subverts
the distribution of roles. Id like to introduce myself, but I dont know
you either, tries Stanley, only to be corrected by an exasperated Chic:
No! No! Me, its me, not you, its me! Later, when Stanley starts
directing Harry (Keenan Wynn) instead of vice versa, Harry yells back,
Its not me, its you! Words can pass from one person to another and
can occupy, indifferently, one person or another. The shot/reverse shot
interplay becomes a relation of absolute otherness, indifference, and
mutual rejection in which subjects and proper names are confused (as
in Mortys failed attempts to learn the names Wabenlottnee and Babewosentall in The Errand Boy).
Lewisian speech accommodates radical contradiction: a gangster
(B. S. Pully) in The Bellboy tells his underlings (Maxie Rosenbloom and
Joe E. Ross) to kick a hole in a guys chest, knock his brains out, and so
on, concluding, And remember one thing: no violence! In The Bellboy, a young woman talking to her mother on a payphone irrelevantly
produces the phrase, Movies are your best entertainment. (Repeated
in the board-meeting scene near the beginning of The Errand Boy and
by the narrator at the end of The Big Mouth, the slogan originated with
an industry-wide promotional campaign to boost theater attendance
in the late 1930s.) Lewis sees speech as internally self-contradictory,
free from the immediate situation, not tied to the speaking individual,
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as self-defeating as it is tautological and self-affirming. Instead of using dialogue for purposes of naturalism or narrative, Lewis and his
collaborator Bill Richmond write dialogue in which speech consists of
advertisements, catchphrases, and slogans. They reveal the tendency of
language to program and serve stereotyped needs or to interpellate the
person who is to be the bearer of the needs. The linguistic difficulties
of Lewiss characters disrupt this process by making fun of it.
Lewisian Space
In The Family Jewels, the armored-car heist and the kids softball game
occupy two different spaces, two different worlds, separated by a fence
(which Willard crawls through to retrieve a ball). Divisions, thresholds,
and doors haunt and fascinate Lewis. In The Errand Boy, the head of
the mailroom has an obsessive aversion to the sound of the door slamming. In The Nutty Professor and The Family Jewels, doors are always a
problem. Miss Lemon (Kathleen Freeman), responding to a summons
from Dr. Warfield at the beginning of The Nutty Professor, accidentally
knocks him down when she opens the door to his office; a few moments
later, Kelp is found underneath a door that the explosion in his classroom
has turned into a coffin lid (showing that the door is an entrance into life
and that life, in Lewiss cinema, is equal to being visible); still later, Kelp
knocks Stella down by opening a door. In The Family Jewels, Willard,
by opening the door to the lawyers office, accidentally causes one of
the lawyers (Jay Adler) to become attached to the door; later, opening
the door to Uncle Juliuss studio, Willard creates another absurd calamity; finally, he arrives at a house that has recently exploded but doesnt
collapse until he knocks at the door. In Hardly Working, Bo, trying to
leave Ballings office, first opens an overfilled closet by mistake, causing
its contents to tumble out onto the floor, then finds the right door but,
in his struggle to open it, pulls it out by its hinges.
If the door motif in Lewis suggests a prevailing horizontality, The
Patsy is a highly vertical film, as the opening titles sequence announces
with its special effect of Stanley apparently falling from the balcony of a
hotel suite, his cutout figure matted over still photographs of the hotel.
This fall (which he finishes by rebounding from a swimming-pool diving
board) is reenacted at the end of the film, but this time the horizontal
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reasserts itself over the vertical, as Lewis opens a door in an apparent

balcony wall to disclose that the space into which Stanley has just fallen is
only a continuation of the floor of the set where the film is being shot.
A main principle of Lewiss films is not to fill in everything, especially
the kinds of marginal or liminal spaces that conventional narrative films,
to secure an impression of naturalism, generally fill in. In the astonishing overhead crane shot in Kelps laboratory in The Nutty Professor, the
camera reaches a distance hard to reconcile with the presumed real
dimensions of the space, letting us know explicitly that this is a fantasy
space, a movie set, a space of experimentation with identity. The space
of The Ladies Man is a charged one of libidinal drives surrounded by an
emptiness that Lewis pulls his camera back far enough to let us see.6
Lewiss compartmentalized sets facilitate the discovery of inner
narratives and secret worlds. In Which Way to the Front?, the mininarratives of Byerss relationships with an Italian mayors wife (Kaye
Ballard) and with Hitler take place entirely inside rooms that seal off
these encounters from the rest of the castle and from the rest of the film.
Within the artificial universe of the boarding house in The Ladies Man,
Miss Cartilages suite is a universe unto itself, with its all-white decor;
it also has its own spatial laws, since it proves to contain not only Miss
Cartilages bedroom but a vast ballroom with a bandstand, on which
Harry James and his big band are gathered to give a private concert
(see fig. 10). Lewis reveals the ballroom with a cut that transforms not
only space but costume: Herbert leaves one shot wearing his usual
casual attire to emerge in the next shot wearing a snazzy suit. The Miss
Cartilage sequence represents not only a private episode for Herbert,
self-contained and without antecedents or consequences in the narrative, but also a dangerous encounter with the figure of Sexual Woman,
from which he has been in flight since his sweethearts traumatizing
betrayal. It is, furthermore, a fantasy in which he momentarily asserts
a mastery of performance (and a slick wardrobe) not revealed in the
rest of the film.
The Miss Cartilage fantasy reveals Lewiss cinema as one of pure play,
expressed through the control of color, decor, and camera movement
in a studio environment, through dance, and through the indulgence of
his love of big-band swing (a musical style that features in many Lewis
films, notably Cinderfella, The Errand Boy, and The Nutty Professor).
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Figure 10. The Ladies Man: Harry James,

Jerry Lewis, and Sylvia Lewis (as Miss Cartilage).
All these elements, which Lewiss work constantly links to the free exercise of the imagination, point to a conception of film as a medium of
transformation and escape, aligned with a tradition of Hollywood luxury
and artistry.
The campus in The Nutty Professor is a volatile space of personal
transformation. At the start of the film, an explosion turns the world
ninety degrees on its axis and leaves behind a thick fog suggestive of
the origin of life: we witness death and rebirth occurring in abstract
space. The settings in the film make these processes manifest: Warfields
outsized office, which makes Kelp shrink (as Stanley shrinks beside Ellen in The Patsy, sitting on the ottoman she wheels out from beneath
her desk) but which Love dominates and turns into an ironic and pitiless theatre; Kelps childhood home, remembered in flashback, with
its wide-angle perspectives and outsized sets and props that decrease
the apparent size of the father, and, in the extreme background, Julius
in the crib; the auditorium that becomes the site of a purely personal
confession (and to which is adjoined a backstage area of solitude and
deflation, feelings familiar to any performer and no doubt a source of
particular terror to Lewis); above all, the Purple Pit, the most alluring
of Lewiss escapist sites, a zone of romanticism, illusion, and alcoholic
dissolution of identity.
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The Purple Pit is a magic space that Love completely controls, turning
it into his own stage, reflecting his moods and whims. It is a fragmented,
shifting space, different in different conditions: initially it is crowded,
public, bright, and splashed with color; but when Love plays Stella by
Starlight on the piano, apparently for Stella alone, the space becomes a
dark, after-hours, womblike enclosure, dominated by a black-and-white
painting of a man seated at a piano in front of a Dali-like imaginary landscape in receding perspective. The space of entertainment and show business is a space for the protagonists multiplication and reflection, mutating
with his or her moods. In Three on a Couch, Lewis treats the space of
psychiatry in a somewhat similar manner. Elizabeths inner office is little
more than a blank white wall before which the characters alone exist,
a pure, stripped theater of observation. Here is Lewiss most minimal,
most abstract mise-en-scne. The deliberately unrealistic studio lighting
creates a privileged world apart, created and inhabited only by colored
lights and by the words of the patients and their psychiatrist. Like the
multicolored lights and liquids in Kelps lab in The Nutty Professor, the
colors in Elizabeths office represent various aspects of people, as if a
person possessed or were, alternately or at the same time, different colors.
(In The Nutty Professor, the colored liquids with which the film opens,
and which spill messily on the floor in the first transformation sequence,
suggest the fragmentation of identity into various components that are
being remixed.)
The characteristic Lewisian environment is luxurious, colorful, and
well-appointed. Chriss living room in Three on a Couch is a large space
with red wall-to-wall carpet, red chairs, black leather sofas, and red
curtains (cf. Lord Sydneys garish bachelor pad in One More Time). The
size of the hotel-suite set in The Patsy permits Lewis to isolate different
color fields and different moods within it: at the beginning of the film,
when the star comedian Wally Brandford has just died, the characters
(dressed in dark funeral clothes) congregate near a large, black sofa; at
the end of the film, after Stanleys rebirth on the Ed Sullivan Show, an
explosion of color occurs as the characters congregate around a bright
orange sofa with multicolored cushions.
Lewis uses color to generate a sense of liveliness and profusion.
Color is another part of the magic, the majesty of making films, and
should be used that exact way, he writes (Total Film-Maker 88). The
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Ladies Man, The Nutty Professor, and Three on a Couch provide the
most dazzling examples of this majesty: their bright colors evoke an
artificial playland of manufactured products, a consumerist paradise
that becomes increasingly cloying from film to film while retaining its
primary meanings of utopia and escape. One is tempted to speak of the
color in these films as working directly on the viewers sense of sight; but
it would be more accurate to say that Lewiss colors, which animate the
frame and evoke the atmosphere and energy of such color musicals of
the 1950s as Singin in the Rain, function as a sign of the possibilities of
cinema and as a declaration of the function of cinema. The sets should
be in bright colors, be luxurious, beautiful, and vast, and be worth the
price of the ticket. I dont think that a man or a woman who have lived
their whole lives in a two-room apartment want to spend eight dollars
to watch another couple in a two-room apartment for an hour and a
half. I think its important for them to get out of their little world and to
see up there on the screen something like the glamour, the fantasy, the
unreachable, everything that Hollywood has done, and that the whole
world is forgetting (qtd. in Benayoun 175). This is the other side of
the Lewisian discourse on Hollywood from the critique of The Errand
Boy: the therapeutic function of cinema. Indeed, most of Lewiss color
films are concerned with healing and with happiness, whereas his two
black-and-white films (The Bellboy and The Errand Boy) depict their
heroes misadventures in more external terms, so that the possibility of
personal happiness arises, at best, as a mirage.
The Ladies Man, Lewiss first color film, sets color and black-andwhite in conflict throughout, starting with the opening titles, whose color
letters are printed in a deluxe book of black-and-white still photographs
of Lewis and women in various costumes. Later in the film, black-andwhite photographs appear in Katies office and on Herberts dresser; the
TV monitor in the Up Your Street sequence displays a black-and-white
image; and a huge black-and-white photograph of Mrs. Wellenmelon looms over the announcer Westbrook van Voorhis. Finally, there is
the Miss Cartilage sequence, with its pure white decor. The nearest
Ive ever been able to get to a true black-and-white is when I shot the
black-and-white set in color for The Ladies Man, Lewis writes, noting that there has never been a black-and-white picture [because] it
comes out in shades of gray (Total Film-Maker 87). The Bellboy and
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The Errand Boy are gray films of photographic realism, whereas The
Ladies Man, The Nutty Professor, The Patsy, The Family Jewels, Three
on a Couch, and One More Time are exuberant films of color stylization.
In The Ladies Man, the black-and-white image within the color image
is a representation, an acknowledged piece of manufactured imagery,
or an allusion to the past. The presence of black-and-white within the
color image helps foreground the constructed, multi-part nature of the
photographed reality.
Lewisian space is shiny and sleek: the cinematography in The Bellboy
enhances the otherworldly smoothness of the great expanses of floor,
with their abstract decorative lines and patterns. A constant theme in
Lewis is the smoothness of surfaces into which nothing can be inserted,
from which nothing can be extracted, on which nothing can catch. In
the gym scene in The Nutty Professor, Kelp cant put his glasses away
because he has no pocketsa characteristic Lewis gag, reminiscent of
the moment in The Ladies Man in which, pretending to search for a
letter of reference to give to Katie, Herbert stalls by repeatedly letting
his hand slide over the pockets of his jacket. In The Bellboy, Stanley
confronts the problem of how to pick up a suitcase that has no handle.
The floor of the psychiatrists office in Cracking Up is so highly polished
that Warren repeatedly slips on it throughout the long opening-titles
sequence (later in the film he defeats this particular adversary by putting
on flippers).
The opening of a film demands the vast space of an office (The
Bellboy, Cracking Up) or hotel suite (The Patsy): the choice of setting
emphasizes the ceremonial nature, and the arbitrariness, of the act of
setting the film in motion. The largeness of the realm of the possible,
within which the film will be circumscribed, translates to the space. At
the beginning of The Patsy, the handlers, bereft of their star, ponder
the emptinessspatial and professionalbefore them and call for a
new star to fill it. Near the beginning of The Family Jewels, it is once
again a question of a death and a role to be filled: which of the uncles
will Donna (under the terms of her fathers will) choose to be her
guardian? The lawyers office, where this question is initially posed
and where Willards arrival disguised as Everett answers it at the end
of the film, translates the question into spatial terms, laying out a large
space of possibility on which Lewiss film writes itself. The sequence
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of Chriss acceptance of the prize in Three on a Couch directly recalls

the ending of The Family Jewels: the vast official space revealed in a
wide shot, with the Lewis character arriving to present himself.
The Bellboy, a film about enclosure, constantly makes its home in
vast spaces: the hotel auditorium where Stanley must set up chairs for
a movie show, the sky (in the scene of Stanleys improvisatory airplane
flight and the scene in which the pop of his flash bulb changes night to
day), the golf course, the race track. These are all spaces too big for humanity that Stanley domesticates by establishing relations with specific,
small objects: the single chair he places so painstakingly in the middle of
a vast empty space at the outset of his Herculean task (see fig. 11), the
briefcase he fetches from the plane, the camera and its flash, the dogs.
Denying his own solitude, which these huge spaces heighten, he fills
their immensity with music (the conducting scene), characters, sounds,
and light. Solitude becomes a theme again in The Errand Boy, with its
shots of Morty alone: the long shot of him sauntering into a soundstage
with a swimming pool, or at the large table in the chairmans office, doing
his pantomime routine to Blues in Hosss Flat. The gradual revelation
of the size of the set (and in particular the large table) at the beginning
of the latter scene is a crucial gesture (repeating, on a smaller scale,
the withdrawal of the camera before the dollhouse set of The Ladies
Man): a crane shot shows Morty entering the office, putting papers on
Figure 11. Jerry Lewis in The Bellboy.
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the desk at the back of the set, then walking forward to the table (the
camera craning back as he does so) and sitting down.
At the end of the scene in The Bellboy in which Stanley conducts an
invisible (but audible) orchestra, the unexpected sound of applause is accompanied by an equally unexpected light change: the house lights dim,
with a spotlight shining on Stanley. Similarly, in The Ladies Man, in the
high-angle shot of Herbert dancing with George Raft (a scene that could
be Herberts fantasy, just as the conducting scene is Stanleys), lights go
down on the house set and a follow spot goes up on Raft and Herbert.
Filmic space in Lewiss films merges with performance space and becomes
theatricalized. Making his singing debut at the Purple Pit in The Nutty
Professor, Love controls the environment by demanding sexy lighting.
At the beginning of Which Way to the Front?, a light change accompanies the drastic switch from a naturalistic narrative scene to a parodic
patriotic speech addressed toward the camera by Byers (In a democracy,
its every mans right to be killed fighting for his country), while his staff
line up behind him to hum America the Beautiful. Near the end of In
Dreams They Run, the muscular-dystrophy sufferer Davey is deposited
in the foreground of a wide shot and left to ponder whether he will finally
accept the wheelchair that his doctors have recommended for him and
that looms behind him in the middle of the composition: at this point,
an unmotivated, unnaturalized dimming of the lights in the foreground
emphasizes not just the importance of the mental and emotional processes
going on within him but also their private, inaccessible nature.
With the mediatization of the house in The Ladies Man comes the
total conflation of domestic and performance spaces. At the start of the
breakfast sequence, as the women do their morning exercises, put on
makeup, and so on, they are on full display and seem to be performing for the audience on the other side of the dollhouses absent fourth
wall. In a logical transformation, the house becomes a TV studio when
it is invaded by the crew of the program Up Your Street. The division
between private and public space is nonexistent throughout The Ladies
Man; even scenes that resemble fantasies, such as Herberts encounters
with Raft and with Miss Cartilage, are staged as public performances.
Lewiss universe is one of total mediatization.
Its a movie set (the end of The Patsy): a central affirmation in
Lewiss work, it could be said of so many of his spaces, even the hotel
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in The Bellboy. All the world is a movie set. Lewiss films often take
place in fantasy spaces, in artificial preserves, in factories (The Errand
Boy, obviously; but also The Ladies Man, set in a boarding school for
aspiring Hollywood starlets) and showrooms of pleasure, such as the
clothing store in Three on a Couch. If the Paramount-backlot streets
seen in Lewiss films from The Ladies Man to The Family Jewels are
the simulacra of a social space, the social space itself is a simulacrum, as
Lewis proves in The Bellboy. By shooting at the Fontainebleau, Lewis
exposes the cinematic nature of the hotel and of self-claimed reality. In
The Big Mouth, Hardly Working, and Cracking Up, Lewis visits places
in the so-called real world to find, again, their artifice, their constructed
nature. The bank in Cracking Up becomes a movie set, complete with
surveillance monitors that function like video-assist monitors (Lewis invented the video assist and introduced it to Hollywood with The
Bellboy). The commercial advertisements that saturate the social space
of Hardly Working (as in the hilarious scene in which Bo elaborately
samples Franks box of Dunkin Donuts) subvert the logic of product
placement to reveal the advertising nature of an entire society.
Many of the blocks of cinema of which The Bellboy is constructed deal
with attempts to use the hotel for escape, such as the sequences involving a pair of clandestine lovers and a newlywed couple, or for personal
transformation, such as the Miss Hartung sequence. Stanley, whose role
throughout much of the film consists of unintentionally undermining and
frustrating others escape attempts, functions as an agent of the critique
of the fantasy as commodity. Walter Winchell, in his voiceover narration
at the beginning of the film, identifies Miami as a place where people
come to play and paya motif reintroduced later when Stanley causes
bright sunlight to appear at 3:30 am by snapping a photo of the moon,
whereupon a guest is heard to say, For the money its costing, well take
the sun whenever they give it to usas if the sun itself were a commodity.
(Stanley, like other Lewis characters, also becomes the privileged subject
of a private, noncommodified fantasy, which Lewis-as-director shares with
the audiencenotably in the sequence of the invisible orchestra.)
Lewiss America belongs partly to fantasy and partly to documentary. The San Diego resort area in The Big Mouth really exists and is
filmed accordingly, but it becomes a fantasy of itselfan aspect of the
film that is highlighted by the cameo appearance of Colonel Sanders of
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Kentucky Fried Chicken fame as an irascible hotel guest. The intrusion

of the narrative into the near-science-fiction spaces of Sea World, including the moment when, escaping from his pursuers, Clamson disguises
himself and takes part in a kabuki performance, further heightens this
fantasy aspect. The Big Mouth belongs to a tradition of film comedies
set at resorts. In such films, which include Les vacances de M. Hulot,
The Cure, and Lewiss own The Bellboy (to which The Big Mouth is a
kind of sequel), the pursuit and supply of pleasures are typically major
themes. Extending this tradition to the fragmented United States of
the late 1960s, The Big Mouth takes place in an endzone landscape
of sealed-off delusions and unpredictable sympathies and antipathies,
where the futility of trying to communicate with other individuals or
with society at large becomes inescapable and where, denied recognition
for his experiences and perceptions, the individual is reduced to trying
to erase himself.
Further down the historical line, the Florida of Hardly Working is a
stagnant place, neither paradise nor dystopia, all too recognizable as part
of the declined, postBretton Woods United States of the early 1980s.
The film is poised awkwardly between documentary and fiction, and, as
with other Lewis films, many of its scenes are either not clearly intended
to be funny or are handled in such a way that their being funny or not
is beside the point, since the scenes function primarily as evidence of a
way of life. Most of the characters and situations of Hardly Working are,
even though played broadly, thoroughly embedded within an implied
social reality; only Lewiss character, Bo, appears not to belong to this
reality and even contradicts it by his presence.
Lewiss documentation of automotive culture through several films
(The Bellboy, The Errand Boy, The Family Jewels, Hardly Working)
marks him as one of the major pop-modernists of American cinema,
along with Howard Hawks, Frank Tashlin, and Andy Warhol. The tracking shot of the car wash in The Errand Boy celebrates the sleekness of
modernity, aligning the film with some of the major themes of American pop culture (see also the parody rock song I Lost My Heart in a
Drive-in Movie in The Patsy). No less than his compartmentalized
block structures and his bright colors, the frequent appearance of flattened and one-dimensional visual forms in Lewiss work expresses his
pop sensibility. These forms also belong to his materialism and show his
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insistence on the essential properties of the image, those that constitute

the image as image. Again and again in Lewiss films we find revealed, at
the center of a more or less rich fictional diegesis, the photographed and
printed image, linking the cinematic scene to photography, especially
as used in mass media: the photo album in the credits sequence of The
Ladies Man, or the gallery of glamour photos outside Uncle Juliuss
studio in The Family Jewels. Photography doesnt preserve the world
but betrays and violates it. The snapping of a photo may become an act
of subversion: in The Bellboy, Stanley effects two of his biggest disruptions (his faux pas at the golf tournament and the night-to-day jump
cut) through photography. In The Family Jewels, Juliuss attempt to
conduct simultaneously two different advertising-photo sessions turns
into a typically Lewisian semi-inadvertent campaign of revenge against
the smooth perfection of the models.
The image has sides that face in different directions (in the Up Your
Street sequence in The Ladies Man, the small TV monitor showing a
close-up of Westbrook van Voorhis faces toward us in the foreground,
while the man himself is in profile in the background); the image has
folds (like the fold in the middle of the double-page spreads of the
credits book at the beginning of the film), lines, and partitions (the
descending wall in Miss Cartilages suite). The image is a composite.
It is not always clear how to read such an image, in what order its different parts should be scanned. If Lewis is in the frame, usually he
is the privileged figure, but this is not always the case: sometimes his
demotion in the image is the point (as when, directed from offscreen
to get out of the camera range during the shooting of Up Your Street,
he creeps slowly out of the frame).
The Lewisian scene is like a room of variable dimensions whose
walls can suddenly fly up and away (The Ladies Man), or which can open
unpredictably onto incongruous spaces (the narrative of Cracking Up,
like that of the second half of Which Way to the Front?, resembles a
series of communicating rooms). Lewis sometimes violently confronts
the unbreakable limits of the frame, as when Vince Barnetts antique
car is crushed in the garage in The Family Jewels. The frame represents
an arbitrary limit that Lewis usually respects: there are few zooms in
his films, even those he made after the use of the zoom had become
routine in Hollywood cinema. But he also extends the limit and reaches
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beyond it. In the shot that cranes back from Herbert in The Ladies Man
to show the entirety of the dollhouse set, or the shot that cranes up from
Kelp writhing on the floor of his lab in The Nutty Professor, Lewis contemplates the possible annulment of the fiction: the movement of the
camera breaches the limit of the frame as a stable, defined site. These
moments are akin to the shots that emphasize the solitude of the Lewis
figure in an immense space in The Bellboy and The Errand Boy: the
size of the space is only appreciable in relation to a human figure, but
Lewis always pushes this relation to an extreme (as in One More Time,
in the scene of Charlie alone in the castle).
The Frame and Its Obstructions
In The Total Film-Maker, Lewis writes: In pictures I direct I do not allow any cinematographer to get behind the camera until after I position
it, select the lens, set it for marks; frame high, low, left or right, and then
lock it. After that, he can light. ... I feel that the moment a director tells
his cinematographer, This is what Id like to see, the director is no longer composing the shot. He abandons a creative responsibility (8990).
The Errand Boy declares itself early on to be a film about the frame and
what it reveals and conceals. After a short series of banal scenes from
commercial films (of various genres, reminding us, as does the prologue
of The Bellboy, that Hollywood is a cinema of genres), Lewis follows up
with behind-the-scenes shots that reveal what lies outside the edges
of the film frame and what occurs before the printed take. In one case,
a person we took to be a woman, standing with her back to the camera
while receiving repeated slaps from a male character, turns out to be
a male stand-in (Mike Mazurki) in a womans wig and costume. That
particular gambitconcealing a face and making its revelation, when
the person turns toward the camera, the punchline of the sceneoccurs
again later in The Errand Boy, when the person giving a moralizing
lecture about the importance of being nice turns out to be the famously
truculent baseball-team manager Leo Durocher (Milton Berles cameo
in drag in Cracking Up is another variation on this theme).
The widening of the field of vision becomes a metaphor for the film.
It happens again near the end of The Errand Boy: a shot of Morty with
the overflowing champagne bottle unexpectedly appears to zoom out
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optically; then it turns out that the scene is being projected on a screen,
from which the camera is tracking back. The shock of this revelation
(which recalls a central moment in Fritz Langs final film, Die tausend
Augen des Dr. Mabuse [The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse; 1960]) is
completely logical. The frame provides security and stability and confers
an internal consistency on the things it contains, but from the beginning
of The Errand Boy, Lewis plays on the absence of something from the
frame, later disclosed, that would allow us to perceive that consistency
as the result of a mise-en-scneto perceive that these things, consistent among themselves, are only surface appearances selected out of a
self-contradictory reality.
Lewis does the same thing at the end of The Patsy: with the acknowledgment that Stanley/Lewis and Ellen/Ina Balin are actors in a
film, the field of view again widens beyond the initial frame. Here, the
frame is metaphorical: the set or sum of what we know (the people
in the theater know I aint going to die, Lewis, as himself, informs
Balin). The widening of the frame also constitutes the structural point
of Lewiss short film Boy. The hero of the film is a young light-skinned
boy who appears to be the victim of racial prejudice in a well-to-do
community otherwise populated entirely by blacks. At the end of the
film, the camera, pulling back from a close shot of the boy at the dinner
table, reveals that his parents and siblings are black.
Lewiss work also manifests a recurrent need to close down and narrow the frameto have that which signifies, acts, performs, and expresses
occupy an ever-smaller part of a screen that is taken up otherwise with
the inexpressive, the merely objective or object-like. In the first scene
in Warfields office in The Nutty Professor, a wide-angle, high-angle shot
over Warfields shoulder finds Kelp tucked into the middleground behind the angled edge of the desk. In the first hotel-suite sequence of
The Patsy, the dark-suited backs of the handlers blot out Stanley in his
individualizing red jacket. Later in the film, when Ellen kisses Stanley,
the back of her dark-haired head fills the frame. In the restaurant scene,
the violinists circling around the couples table block Ellen and Stanley
from our view (just as, in the next shot, the orchestras music drowns out
the sound of the couples conversationan example of the sound/image
equivalence that is one of the principles of Lewiss cinema).
As he tries to register at the hotel in The Bellboy, Jerry Lewis be An American Dream
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comes hidden from the camera by the crowding of his staff. In the
morning sequence of The Ladies Man, in the cafeteria, Herbert is in
the background, his figure blotted out by the figures of the girls. In
The Errand Boy, the extras who line up to be marched onto a soundstage trap Morty against a wall and block him from the camera, forcing
him to squeeze his way into the line to be seen. Later in the film, as
an elevator fills with people, Morty, initially alone at the back of the
elevator, again becomes hidden from the view of the camera. Remaining within (and foregrounding) the logic of the star system, Lewiss
art of concealment and revelation takes his own figure as that which
is concealed and revealed most obsessivelyeven to the level of disguising the obsessiveness as an elaborate accident. The rushes of the
cocktail-party scene that the Baron (Sig Ruman) has directed find
Morty, in the background, repeatedly revealed by the movements of a
foreground extra, then concealed again, and finally peeking up over the
heads of the extras to look at the camera (see fig. 12). His intermittent
and insistent presence disrupts the Barons film.
In the movie-premiere sequence, Morty is initially concealed among
the crowd outside the theater, only to be revealed when an extra in the
foreground changes position; later, in the scene of the birthday celebration for a star, Anastasia Anastasia (Iris Adrian), Morty is at first invisible, then is belatedly revealed pushing a cart that carries a cake and
Figure 12. Jerry Lewis in The Errand Boy.
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champagne. Shots such as these last two seem designed to arouse the
viewers curiosity as to how and where the Lewis character will appear
in a scene, creating a suspense whose arbitrariness with respect to the
narrative underlines a purely cinematic logic. Similarly, Which Way to
the Front? features a composition of German officers in a room, forming
a solid block on the left side of the frame, behind which Byers/Kesselring
invisibly enters to place himself inconspicuously in the right background,
before announcing his presence to them (and us) with his first line. The
frame, for Lewis, becomes a hiding place and a three-dimensional field
of overlapping surfaces and volumes. Lewis underlines the importance
of his characters comings into and goings from the frame with dialogue
that makes the theme of leave-taking explicit: Herberts long, awkward,
and finally aborted farewell attempt at the end of The Ladies Man (When
the door slams, my life is out of yours); Clamson warning the highway
patrol officers of his intention to exit the scene in The Big Mouth; Bos
taking leave of Balling after creating a mess in his office in Hardly Working (Okay, Im leaving it, and Im leaving. But this leaving is not leaving
it; I mean, Im going, but its staying). Going and coming are matters
that Lewis takes most seriously.
Lewiss creativity with obstructive bodies reaches a peak in Three on
a Couch. A striking composition shows Susan (Mary Ann Mobley) tucked
into the upper right of the frame behind Elizabeths back, which takes up
the rest of the shot. In a later scene, Susan, during her psychiatric session, does leg exercises in the foreground while Elizabeth, at her desk, is
framed between Susans legs. Three on a Couch is explicitly a film about
blockage and force, about the physicality of point of view. Throughout
the film, the characters problems arise out of their visual situatedness
for one another in a world of illusion; as in The Ladies Man, the central
problem is one of leaving that world, a problem expressed by Elizabeths
refusal to separate from her patients. Visibility is full of traps and blocks.
Early in the film, as Chris tries to persuade Elizabeth to accompany him
to Paris, Lewis plays a fairly long two-shot on his back and her face; only
at the very end of the shot does Chris turn toward the camera. In a scene
in Chriss apartment, the camera executes a slow circular track around the
couch as Chris and Elizabeth kiss; during part of the cameras trajectory,
the couples backs are to the camera. Chris is filmed from behind again
during the great dance long take, the camera apparently delegating to
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him, or sharing with him, its gaze at the enraptured Elizabeth (though,
as the end of the shot reveals, hes been sleeping on his feet). The miseen-scne thwarts and denies the expressiveness of faces.
In the party sequence of Three on a Couch, the film reaches a plateau
of delirious visual excess. Everything is too much: sensory overload of
music, people, and movement; the persistent annoyance of Buddy Lesters drunk. Through it all, and through the following sequence in which
the partygoers pursue Chris and Elizabeth to the pier, Lewis remains
concerned with the boundaries of the spaceChris clings to the edge
of the space, trying to escape (via the elevator; see fig. 13)and with
things that spill over or poke through (the drunks body partially hanging out of the window of the cab or dangling from a life preserver that
is being hoisted up on a crane). As in other Lewis films, the frame is
crammed with things, the way Kelps body is crammed into the shelf in
The Nutty Professor, the way bodies are crammed into the elevator in
The Errand Boy, and extras are crammed into the mises-en-scne of the
two German-accented directors in that same film. Space is conceived
always, therefore, as a limit, a frame.
Figure 13. Visual excess in Three on a Couch:

James Best, Renzo Cesana, Fritz Feld,
Jerry Lewis, and Janet Leigh.
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The Big Mouth reveals the same immense artistry of the organization of bodies within the frame. When Clamson is threatened by
gangsters, a medium shot shows him and a gangster, facing toward the
camera, framed between two other gangsters who have their backs to
the camera. Lewis intercuts this shot with an off-balance close shot
framing Clamson and the back of a gangsters head. The screen is a
convergence of faces, arms, and weapons (the gangsters point their
guns at Clamson from four directions). Clamson, pulled over on the
road, is framed within the crook of the arm of a policeman who stands
with his hand on his hip. Later, Clamson (in his Kelp-like disguise as a
hotel guest) is framed under the hotel managers arm, leaning on the
counter. Still later, Clamson pokes his head into the shot from behind
a mans leg to stare at the camera.
Stubbornly interposing themselves, people are blocks for other people
and for the camera. In Which Way to the Front?, as in The Big Mouth,
the proportion of space in the frame occupied by a character stands for
that characters power, while the other characters must maneuver to be
seen by the camera: in the foreground, the back of the head of the recruiting officer partly obstructs Byers, who is facing the camera; during the
dialogue, Bland, Hackle, and Love (Dack Rambo) poke their heads into
the composition in the background, peeking into the shot.
Such moments, in which Lewis plays on and foregrounds the arbitrariness of framing by adjusting the composition before the viewers
eyes, are frequent in his films. In the poolroom scene of The Family
Jewels, the pool players stick their heads into the shot from behind
foreground figures to stare at Skylocks money. In The Patsy, a camera
movement reframes the shot of Stanley trying on a jacket in the mirror
at Sy Devores shop so that the reflection of another customer, George
Raft, becomes visible (to Stanley and to the viewer): a purely optical
moment. The composition may be arbitrary in relation to the face and
the body: in The Nutty Professor, the frame cuts off the top of the head
of a very tall man (Richard Kiel), then frames a second man correctly
but leaves Kelp low in the frame. In the shot of Faith and her lover kissing in The Ladies Man, the frame neatly lops both their heads off.
Though the narrative framework is looser than in some earlier Lewis
films, the visual framing in Hardly Working is anything but casual. A shot
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of Bo in a lawn chair reading a newspaper is angled so that, deep in the

background, Millie appears on the tennis court in the upper half of the
frame, while the empty chair beside him is balanced in the frame with
him. The empty area beside Bo seems to summon Millie to occupy it,
which she will shortly do. The post office scenes are a series of modernist shots with Mondrian-like compositions of boxes, file cabinets, and
mail-sorting compartmentsall of which Bo disrupts.
Lewiss art of the frame sometimes takes the form of grand arabesques like the opening of The Ladies Man, in which the camera surveys in a meticulous long take the chain of random interactions that
upsets the nervous little community of Milltown. In The Family Jewels,
Willards leadership of the parade marchers (in a scene that takes off
from the Face the Music number in Taurogs Youre Never Too Young)
promotes a beautifully stylized chaos. In The Errand Boy, a cutaway
scene of Morty driving a trolley around the Paramutual lot implies the
extent of the chaos he has been spreading. Disaster is necessary and
salutary: this is a tradition in American comedy. It can break out at any
moment, on any pretext (and can be summoned by the very fear of
disaster, as the opening sequence of The Ladies Man suggests). Lewiss
comedy follows this tradition by targeting all forms of repression and
control and declaring them to be doomed to fail, showing their weakness before the powerful currents that will inevitably break through
them. Chaos in Lewiss films also figures as a (usually indirect) form of
revenge. For example, in The Ladies Man, Herberts seemingly inadvertent destruction of Gainsboroughs hat is a way of getting even with
the man for his arrogant bullying, and in The Nutty Professor, Loves
humiliation of Warfield obliquely avenges Warfields treatment of Kelp.
In The Big Mouth, Colonel Sanderss humiliation of the hotel manager
avenges, indirectly, the managers meanness to Clamsonrevenge is effective as such even if it is not performed by the person being avenged.
This is also the case with the comeuppances delivered to such figures
as Quimby (Ray Walston) in Whos Minding the Store? and Tuffington
(Everett Sloane) in The Disorderly Orderly.
No less than a therapeutic expedient or an ideological device, disaster
for Lewis is a structural imperative. In the party sequences that elaborately close Three on a Couch, Buddy Lesters drunk appears from out of
nowhere to introduce an external element of disorder in a miseen-scne
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already overloaded with elements and full of strain. The catastrophes

unleashed by Lewiss characters often have an outsize, excessive quality
and, at the same time, are often only weakly related to his own agency.
These observations find their ultimate object in his last two films with
Tashlin, Whos Minding the Store? and The Disorderly Orderly, rather
than in Lewiss own filmsTashlinian disaster is transhuman and universal, whereas Lewisian disaster is contained and concentrated. In The
Errand Boy, by tripping over a garbage can, Morty causes a (naturalistically improbable) chain reaction of all the stenographers dropping piles
of paper from their desks. At the end of the scene of the music lesson
in The Patsy, the agonized Muellers high note causes, inexplicably, the
complete destruction of the set, surveyed in a long shot. What is most
striking is, as usual with Lewis, a dichotomy, a split, an ambivalence:
on the one hand, the loose sprawl of chaos, and on the other hand, the
fanatical control of a mise-en-scne that organizes and brings forth an
effect of chaos. Lewis finds the perfect image for this constant duality
in The Errand Boy: the unintegrated, random element that sticks out
because it has not been planned (Morty destroying the Barons miseen-scne of the party scene) has, of course, been placed there (by the
true director, Lewis) so that it cannot be missed.
Disorder, for Lewis, represents social failure, whereas for Tashlin
disorder is cosmic vengeance. Even when it appears (as in the Lewis
scenes just mentioned) in its positive aspect as a rejection of oppressive values, social failure needs to be paired with its opposite, mastery.
The Patsy follows a trajectory from chaos to order: from the recording
studio (the forest of microphones; the A&R man yelling tonelessly)
to the perfectly staged and executed Ed Sullivan Show skit (which,
repeating the overall narrative movement, concerns the heros magical
self-reinvention). The Patsy is the most fully achieved of Lewiss films;
no scene in Lewis is more meticulously directed than the flashback
high-school hop scene, which completes its own emblematic and selfcontained movement from chaos to order, as, over the course of their
dance, Stanley and his dancing partner change from awkwardness to
grace (a triumph celebrated by the cameras graceful crane upward).
In the deliriously reductive and self-reflexive ending of The Patsy, the
exercise of directorial control for its own sakefor the sheer exhilaration of itproves to be the point of the film.
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Lewisian Time
The house that explodes from within in The Family Jewels doesnt collapse until Willard comes to knock at the door. In The Errand Boy, the
suits of armor that Morty accidentally knocks over remain immobile on
the ground for some time before they slowly start picking themselves
up. In The Ladies Man, Herbert, asked by a TV soundman (Doodles
Weaver) to test a microphone, shouts into it, with a predictably devastating effect on the headphones-wearing technician; the camera stays
on Herbert for an extended time as he goes downstairs and looks for
the soundman, who turns out to have somehow buried himself under
the cushions of a sofa. When the soundman gets his revenge by yelling
into the microphone while Herbert is wearing the headphones, Herbert
calmly walks away before abruptly exclaiming, Oh! and collapsing to
the floor. In this sequence, Lewis inverts the usual relationship of the
components of the gag, making delay the source of the humor and the
point of the joke; the punchline is merely a kind of formal obligation
or punctuation.
In an original variation of Lewiss conceptual humor, sometimes
he elides the punchline or payoff entirely. Usually, when there is delay
in a film, we are made aware that we are waiting for something, and
we know roughly what we are waiting for, but Lewis may give us the
delay and then omit the predictable payoff. In The Bellboy, we are left
to imagine what the reaction of a guest will be when he finds that the
trousers he sent Stanley to press have been returned to him stiff as a
board. In the swimming-pool scene of The Errand Boy, the introductory
long shot with the pool in the foreground and Morty entering in the
far background is enough to establish the inevitability of his eventual
fall into the pool. Lewis cuts from Morty peering into the pool to an
underwater shot of an outfitted diver at the pool bottom; then, after a
moment, Morty swims into the shot. The expected gag shot, showing
Morty falling into the pool, is missing. In Hardly Working, Bos visit to a
glass factory to apply for a job results in a dialogue-free scene comprising three shots in the companys parking lot, over which the sound of
glass shattering proceeds for several seconds before Bo emerges from
the building. The punchline is built into the structure of the scene and
begins and ends with it: is it still a punchline?
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The delayed punchline is related to the classic slow burn of American comedy (among its masters was Edgar Kennedy, a frequent foil for
Laurel and Hardy), a device that Lewis made the principle of some of
his greatest scenes, including the Buddy Lester hat scene in The Ladies Man. Over the course of a lengthy shot in The Bellboy, the hotel
manager learns on the phone that Stanley has taken off in an airplane:
the humor is in the extended period of calm before the actors broad
reaction (He ... WHAT!?) when the magnitude of Stanleys act sinks
in. (Lewis re-creates the shot in Hardly Working.) Lewis often pushes
the device past the point where it could be expected to yield laughter,
as if he were testing himself (and his audience) to see how long he can
make the delay last. After Clamson escapes from Fongs laboratory in
The Big Mouth, the crooks stand in silence for several seconds before
tacitly agreeing to acknowledge that their prey has left and belatedly
exploding in ragea group slow burn.
Lewiss work aggravates the psychological tension on which the slow
burn is based. The scene with the music teacher in The Patsy is built
on an unrealistic extension in duration of hyperrealistic attitudes of
embarrassment, awkwardness, and polite restraint (Professor Muellers
reactions as he forbears from stopping Stanley from going around the
room and touching everything). A psychological improbabilitythe
lack of developmentis built into the structure of the scene, creating
awkwardness and anxiety. In the scene of the crooks delayed reaction
to Clamsons exit in The Big Mouth, the actors must try to fill up a mysterious space of doing nothing, and this testing of their resourcefulness
creates tension. A lengthy silence precedes the first line in Which Way
to the Front?, as Finkel stands at awkward attendance beside his bosss
chair, before finally venturing: New business to tackle, Mr. Byers? (as
if the film, barely started, were still waiting for some invisible signal
from its onscreen director before it can begin in earnest). In The Nutty
Professor, the scene of Kelp in Warfields office starts with an extreme
and awkward delay, as Warfield stares stonily at his guest, who, not
knowing what to do, occupies himself with various objects.
By prolonging duration, Lewis highlights changes in behavior over
a single shot or scene. Jerry Lewis and his entourage in The Bellboy are
at the registration desk: at an arbitrary point in this long take, but not
before, the entourage starts laughing at everything the star says. Here
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is the open revelation of structure itself, of the principle at work within

the block of movements and affects that is the scene. In The Ladies
Man, the behavior and character of Gainsborough change radically over
the course of the hat scene: the turning point is Herberts replacing the
mangled hat on Gainsboroughs head, whereupon the gangster-like
tough instantly turns insecure and shrinks. Later in the film, George
Raft, at first self-assured, becomes suddenly desperate to prove his identity (which Herbert doubts) by dancing with Herbert. In all these cases,
Lewis allows the structuring principle of a scene to declare itself in a
manner that is at least weakly motivated, if not totally unmotivated.
In his experiments with extended duration, Lewis is a materialist
filmmaker, directing the audiences attention to the various elements of
image and sound of which the scene, the block, is composed and letting
them be exhaustively enumerated. Delay is a mode of confrontation:
what is before the camera becomes more inescapable and more stubborn
the more it is lingered on. As Raymond Durgnat notes of The Ladies
Man, a film whose entirety he describes as a temps-mort, The absence
of continuous dramatic thread piles a special intensity of audience attention on to a gag, and on to its build-up, which permit more sophisticated
forms (236). Throughout his work, Lewis stretches moments out, repeats them, indulges them, and lives in them for themselves. Lewis has
no qualms about lengthening a gag through repetition, as in the scene
in The Bellboy in which Stanley waits for an elevator that wont come,
all the while banging on the buttons and the door and making gestures
of helplessness in the direction of the bell captain, who (embodying
another principle of Lewisian comedy, the unresponsive partner) stands
watching stonily. In One More Time, the slowness of a butler carrying
the dinner tray to the table occasions a bizarrely protracted series of
surreal visual gags, as Chris and Charlie apparently age several years
while waiting for their meal (a more muted variation on this idea occurs
in the superb restaurant sequence in Cracking Up).
The Big Mouth is full of pauses and longueurs; the principles of
the narrative are interruption, fixation, and forgetting the point (the
diamondsthe pretext for the plot and the motive for the actions of
Thor and his gangare never found). The film has a great deal of
movement, climaxing in the chase on foot through Sea World, but the
narrative movement is so retarded and so indefinite that the film could
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be said to move backward. At one point, Clamson is pulled over by a

highway patrolman, whereupon a group of other policemen gradually
gather at the scene to debate the code number of Clamsons violation.
The principle of this scene of splendid stasis is merely addition/subtraction: the accumulation within the frame of more and more policemen
and the departure from the frame, unnoticed by them, of Clamson.
Later in the film, Clamsons encounter with Webster, the supposed
FBI man, in the hotel restaurant not only fails to advance the plot, it
brings it to a standstill.
The mail-delivery sequence in The Ladies Man, with Herbert becoming embroiled in a series of encounters with the women of the house
as he delivers each one her mail, exemplifies an important aspect of
duration in Lewiss work: seriality. The house set itself, with its separate
and equivalent apartments, is a serial construction. Lewis often builds
sequences in terms of repetitive seriesof people in a line, for instance.
When Jerry Lewis arrives at the hotel in The Bellboy, a protracted take
shows an impossibly long series of members of his entourage leaving the
limousine, until (after the camera executes a graceful crane shot across
the top of the car) the star himself makes his long-awaited appearance at
the end of the line. In The Errand Boy, a group of people file past Morty
out of the office he is trying to enter. Similarly, in a magnificent scene in
The Nutty Professor, Stella, still dazed by her last nights encounter with
the mysterious Buddy Love, must wait at the open classroom doorway
(before the eyes of the transfixed Kelp, who imagines her in successive
costumes) while a long series of students files in. A variation on this idea
is the succession of female models who walk past Ringo in the store in
Three on a Couch.
In the scenes in The Nutty Professor and Three on a Couch, it is as
if Lewis were unable to conceive of desire without also immediately
conceiving of the multiple. The desired object is not desired alone;
it exists in a profusion that is expressed as a series. Or rather, desire
itself leads to a state of multiple vision in which the object appears as
a repetition of itself. The trouble that desire usually causes for Lewiss
characters is expressed no less through this multiplicity (as with the
convention of models in The Bellboy and the female boarders in The
Ladies Man) than through its standardization, which paradoxically
renders the desired object at once more available and more elusive.
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(In The Family Jewels, Willard is lost in daydreams before the gallery
of glamour photos outside Juliuss studio.) Always, the multiple is a
value of time, whether the items appear across the scene in succession,
like the models in Three on a Couch, or all at once, like the models
in The Bellboy or the group of women who attend Chriss funeral in
One More Time, identically dressed in black veils and black leather
miniskirts. The screen becomes a space of desire in which desire is
expressed in terms of duration.
In the swimming-pool scene in The Errand Boy, as Morty approaches
the camera from the distant background, depth is the visual correlative
of the duration of the shot. The Bellboy, too, is a film of extreme depth
of field. In a wide-angle shot of the empty ballroom that he must fill with
chairs, Stanley enters from behind the camera and walks all the way to
the back of the room, becoming tiny. A composition with four bellboys
in medium shot shows the dog-track field and scoreboard in clear focus
in the distant background. Stanley, in the foreground of another shot,
watches Stan Laurel go all the way to the back of the set and get into
an elevator. The final shot of The Bellboy has Stanley, in the hotel lobby,
walking away from the camera into the background. Translating time
into space, these shots create passageways of infinite time, extending the
possibilities (already enlarged by the Lewisian block structure) for time
to move through the film.
Lewis also relates time to space by emphasizing the pause before a
place is filled. At the beginning of The Bellboy, Stanley is missing from
his place in line, and then he pops into it. Herberts introduction at the
graduation ceremony in The Ladies Man is based on a similar idea: the
Lewis character is at first absent from a large block of people sitting in
the auditorium, in whose midst he suddenly emerges, leaping into the air
like a jack-in-the-box when the speaker on stage mentions his name.
In the scene of Stanleys stand-up debut at the Copa Caf in The
Patsy, humor arises from the confrontation of two deficiencies: the lack
of response from the sparse audience, and Stanleys lack of performance
skill. Lewis emphasizes both lacks by drawing out the scene through a
series of repetitions: Stanleys mishaps with the microphone, his botched
attempts at jokes, and so on. Given a sequence that is built on the impossibility of development (since Stanley never gets better, and the audience
is never amused), Lewis ends it with an arbitrary recourse to fantasy:
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the image of Ellen and the handlers transformed into a firing squad (in
military uniforms) to execute Stanley. The fantasy only highlights the
stagnancy of a situation that, lacking a logically necessary conclusion
or an internal movement that would impel it to reach one, can only be
ended abruptly from outside. The fantasy image has, moreover, that
peculiarly isolated quality that is characteristic of the images in Lewiss
films and that marks their independence from verisimilitude and from
the flow of normal storytelling.
Sound
When Donna repeats Bugsys math lesson in The Family Jewels, she reproduces not only the words that Bugsy speaks but his vocal rendition of
them: the reproduction is, in fact, mechanical, the tape of Bugsys (Lewiss) voice being replayed on the soundtrack over the image of Donna.
This is one of the conceptual jokes that abound in Lewiss filmsa joke
whose levels are uncertain, so that its not clear what were supposed to
be laughing at. Does the humor lie in Donnas uncanny and unexpected
ability to reproduce Bugsys voice with total accuracy? Or is it a joke
on the confusion between a tape recording and actual speecha joke
that would thus appeal to our knowledge that it is a tape recording, a
knowledge from outside the diegesis (where Donna does not have a tape
recorder to record and replay her uncles speech)? The Lewisian flavor
of the joke comes from the superimposition of the two possible ways of
getting it, from the refusal of the film to privilege one or the other level
and to reduce the ambiguity that arises from their co-presence.
No less significant in this joke is the foregrounding of recording
technology. Recording is a key Lewisian obsession, in his films and in his
life. Robert Benayoun, interviewing Lewis for the first of many times,
was surprised to see Lewis switch on his own tape recorder: [H]e records all his conversations, of which he keeps catalogued and numbered
copies among his collections of personal scrapbooks, scripts, records,
and kinescopes (62). When I interviewed Lewis for this book, he kept
his own minidisc recorder running all the time, opposite mine. Carried
over into his films, the possibility granted by recording technology of
multiplying and repeating lived moments becomes a highly individual
manner of exploding filmic time and increasing the distance between
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time as filmed and time as lived. Ticklish Stanley, in the barbers chair
in The Patsy, giggles in a fast-motion, tape-speeded-up voice. In the
car wash in The Errand Boy, the drenched Mrs. Paramutual (Kathleen
Freeman) leaks tape-reversed speech. Tape manipulation garbles both
Willards commands to the marchers in The Family Jewels and Studss
voice in the hospital in The Big Mouth (as with Mrs. Paramutual, the
disruption of the characters voice is the direct result of a disastrous
contact with the Lewis figure).
In each of these scenes, a certain brutality can be felt in the way
the film takes over the characters voice and separates it from the image of the character, visibly and audibly subjecting the character to a
mechanical process, violating the (imaginary) integrity of the person.
The person becomes split and recomposed, a set of components that
can be independently manipulated. This process belongs to the cinematic apparatusa prime concern of Lewiss cinema. Lewis shows
how it works in the dubbingsession scene in The Errand Boy, in which
a singer substitutes her trained voice for that of the talentless starlet
singing Lover onscreen. This scene apparently draws its inspiration
from Singin in the Rain, a constant reference point for Lewis, as he
proves again with the boat-captain sequence in The Family Jewels. In
the dubbing scene in The Errand Boy, Lewis reverses the customary
filmmaking procedure, demonstrated not only in Singin in the Rain
but also in The Patsy, of first recording the song as it is to be heard in
the film and then photographing the actor lip-synching to a playback
of the song. Lewiss films break the link between voice and person
that is the customary guarantee of authenticity, integrity, and legitimacy. In The Nutty Professor, the voices of Kelp and Love emerge,
inopportunely, from the mouths of each alter ego. In the record-show
sequence of The Patsy, as in the scene of the premiere of the musical
in The Errand Boy, bad synchronization between image and sound
renders the cinematic person incoherent.
Lewiss use of sound portrays the person as a machine, on a level
with the other sound-emitting devices that proliferate in his films. Miss
Cartilage inaugurates the Harry James fantasy in The Ladies Man by
placing the needle on a phonograph record. In The Patsy, Ferguson
listens to an open-reel recording of Stanleys stand-up routine. In The
Family Jewels, Willard, after sending Donna to bed in their hotel suite,
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plays a record of Gary Lewis and the Playboys This Diamond Ring
on the phonograph. In Which Way to the Front?, Byers tries to learn
German from a record. The elaborate decor of the psychiatrists office
in Cracking Up includes a turntable.
Noise renders the human an appendage of the mechanical. Morty,
on his mail-delivery run in The Errand Boy, enters the stenographic
department to be confronted by a cacophony of typewriter noise, over
which he tries without success to make his voice heard. Just as in The
Bellboy, Jerry Lewis signals for silence from his noisy mob of assistants
and hangers-on and instantly obtains it (see fig. 14), here a stenographer
raises her hand, suddenly bringing the typewriters to total silence. Morty
continues talking at a loud volume, but it is only nonsense, since he assumes he is still not being heard; realizing that the competing noise has
stopped, he lowers his voice. This performance touchan action painting in sound illustrating the Bergsonian definition of the comic as du
mcanique plaqu sur du vivantresembles the moment in The Patsy
in which Stanley, backstage at the TV record show, cant stop dancing
even though he has become aware of Ellen watching hima moment
that in turn recalls Kelp continuing to dance by himself at the prom even
after he becomes aware of Dr. Warfields disapproval.
Lewis uses sound as a weapon that acts on and overwhelms the visual
field of the film and the objects in it. In The Patsy, as Professor Mueller
Figure 14. Lewis signals for silence in The Bellboy.
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gets ready to produce the loud note that will disarrange Stanleys eyebrows, the sound of his preliminary intake of breath is artificially exaggerated. Later in the same sequence, Muellers singing voice (and not,
as might be expected, Stanleys bumbling) proves the destructive force
that reduces his apartment to rubble. In The Ladies Man, headphone
amplification of loud voices causes the hapless soundman to become
buried under the cushions of a sofa and, later, shatters his glasses. In
The Errand Boy, the mailroom managers shouts and desk banging send
Morty into anguished paroxysms of flinching and reeling. The scene that
pushes this aspect of Lewiss work the furthest is the scene of Kelps
hangover in The Nutty Professor, in which sounds arising naturally out
of the realistic representation of the classroom setting (chalk scraping
on a chalkboard, drops of liquid falling into a test tube, a girl blowing
her nose) become amplified and distorted.
Dissociated from an onscreen characters perception, the same principle of sound magnification is at work throughout Lewiss cinema. Many
Lewis gags rely on combining a small sound source with a big sound:
portable radios in The Ladies Man and The Errand Boy, Baby (the
ferocious animal that roars from offscreen like a big cat but turns out
to be a small dog) in The Ladies Man, Kelps pocket watch in The Nutty
Professor. In The Family Jewels, the sound of Matsons hand rustling
inside a bag of nuts is magnified on the sound track as Skylock lines up
a pool shotan effect that recalls the click of Stanleys camera at the
golf tournament in The Bellboy.
Despite such effects of incommensurateness, Lewiss cinema demands the equivalence of sound and image; when a sound source is no
longer visible in the image, its associated sound is no longer heard. In
The Bellboy, Stanley, covering the lens with his hand, simultaneously
cuts off the babble of the female models on the soundtrack. During
the mail-delivery sequence of The Ladies Man, a girl listening to dance
music on a portable radio leaves the frame in the background by turning a corner, and the music leaves the soundtrack at the same time. In
The Errand Boy, Mortys portable radio, loudly blaring big-band jazz in
the mailroom, cannot be extinguished despite his best efforts, until he
goes out the screen door with it, whereupon the sound quickly fades.
The most radical sound effect in Lewiss work is the complete cutoff
of sound during the TV-show scene in The Ladies Man, when Herbert
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disconnects Mrs. Wellenmelons microphone (see fig. 15). Lewis, in his

interview with me, commented: I just included the audience into that
scene. Thats really going through the fourth wall. The sudden loss of
sound splits the perspective of the scene in mid-take, so that we see it
from one point of view but hear it (or, rather, dont hear it) from another.
His sound materialism drives Lewis to preserve and draw attention
to recording mishaps and, more generally, mechanical and electronic
noises that are normally suppressed in favor of a polished sound recording. Stanley starts his Copa Caf monologue in The Patsy off-mic. As
he struggles to set the mic up on its stand, the resulting noise fills the
soundtrack. In the prom sequence in The Nutty Professor, the prominent
noise of Kelps breath on the microphone intensifies the awkwardness
of his confession on stage. Near the end of the Miss Cartilage scene in
The Ladies Man, after the Harry James song ends, we hear the crackling
sound of the phonograph needle repeatedly going over the locked groove
at the end of the recorda sound effect rarely used in films. In The
Errand Boy, the tape of the fanfare at Anastasias birthday celebration
is edited so that it is prolonged in a loop, suspending the participants in
a waiting to begin.
Lewiss films link music directly to fantasy. Cinderfella announces
the crucial importance of this nexus when Lewiss Fella makes his
Figure 15. The disconnected microphone

in The Ladies Man: Jerry Lewis, Helen Traubel.
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debut as the prince to the accompaniment of Count Basie and his big
band. The conducting sequence in The Bellboy, the George Raft and
Harry James scenes in The Ladies Man, the Blues in Hosss Flat
pantomime in The Errand Boy, and the high-school hop sequence in
The Patsy are all moments in which the Lewis character frees himself
from his tasks and frustrations to become the central figure in a fantasy
scored with lush orchestral music. Acquiring the magical ability to
sing and play the piano, Kelp as Love in The Nutty Professor succeeds
in externalizing a fantasy self-image. The polished and swaggering
big-band scores of Three on a Couch, The Big Mouth, Which Way to
the Front?, and Cracking Up hold out the promise of a fusion of the
fragmented identities into which the Lewis character divides in these
narratives. By giving that elusive cohesion the color of a musical style
that was already obsolete, or at least dated, at the time of the earliest of these films, the scores invoke the past as a locus of continuity
and plenitude. The absence of this kind of music in Hardly Working
heightens the fretfulness and lugubriousness of that film, in which
more modern pop-music styles (in the strip club scene and the disco
fantasy scene) characterize a musical environment that the Lewis figure is no longer able to dominate and that fails to resonate with his
own past, or that he can control only in a daydream from which he is
humiliatingly awakened (as at the end of the disco fantasy).
Lewis realized at an early age that with the voice God had given
me, I certainly wasnt going to be a singer like my dad, with his Al Jolson
baritone (Lewis and Kaplan 13). This realization inspired Lewis to
base his stage routine on pantomiming to records, asserting a parodic
ownership of the mass-reproduced voice. With Dean Martin, Lewis
liberated his own voice (accentuating its adenoidal, adolescent quality)
and found a use for it as an instrument of comic retaliation and disruption. In a further development, Lewiss growing ambition and mastery
led him to present himself as a legitimate singer on a series of albums
starting with 1957s Jerry Lewis Just Sings (on which he recorded several
songs associated with Jolson) and in the early solo films The Delicate
Delinquent, Rock-a-Bye Baby, and Cinderfella.
The role of the voice in Lewiss self-directed films is crucial. As Scott
Bukatman observes, The Errand Boy is strikingly organized around
the sound of the human voice, and vocal repetitions and misrepetitions
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determine the structure of its comedy (194). Murray Pomerance has

devoted an extended analysis to Morty Tashmans weak vocality and
linguistic incompetence (Errant Boy). If the familiar childlike tones of
Lewiss shlemiel figures (such as Morty in The Errand Boy and Stanley
in The Patsy) often come to mind first in thinking of Lewis, his more
flamboyant and excessive vocal characterizations, no less than his ability
to use his normal voice for a variety of cinematic purposes, are also
striking. The strident Kesselring (as himself and as impersonated by
Byers) in Which Way to the Front?, the croaking Kelp in The Nutty Professor (whose tentative diction and creaky timbre are reprised by Julius
in The Family Jewels and the disguised Clamson in The Big Mouth),
and the simpering Rutherford in Three on a Couch are key examples of
Lewisian figures whose vocal eccentricities permit him to foreground
linguistic breakdown as performance and to make speech the main action and theme of his films, displacing narrative conflict and character
development. The silence of Stanley in The Bellboyless a refusal to
speak than a radical, personal form of speechis the more significant
because of Lewiss vocal prowess and emphasis on speech elsewhere.
Lewiss gestures toward silent cinema in the film are not only homages
to particular comics (especially Stan Laurel); they are homages to the
mystery and efficacy of silence itself.
The Total Filmmaker
Literature, Maurice Blanchot writes,
is made up of different stages which are distinct from one another and
in opposition to one another. ... The writer is not simply one of these
stages to the exclusion of the others, nor is he even all of them put
together in their unimportant succession, but the action which brings
them together and unifies them. ... Every time a writer is challenged
in one of his aspects he has no choice but to present himself as someone
else, and when addressed as the author of a beautiful work, disown
that work, and when admired as an inspiration and a genius, see in
himself only application and hard work, and when read by everyone,
say: Who can read me? I havent written anything. This shifting on
the part of the writer makes him into someone who is perpetually absent, an irresponsible character without a conscience, but this shifting
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also forms the extent of his presence, of his risks and his responsibility.
(Literature 36869)
It may seem disingenuous or paradoxical to claim of someone who

managed to make himself a dominant force in many mediamass media, at thatthat he is like a writer who is perpetually absent. Has
not Jerry Lewis, on the contrary, made himself perpetually present?
Yet no one could understand better than Lewis the shifting of which
Blanchot writes. He has made this shifting the stance and the subject of
his films: films that denounce and unmake themselves, in which Lewis
himself, as actor, continually appears as someone else, refusing to
remain in any position.
In The Total Film-Maker, Lewis writes:
A man who is going to write, produce, direct, and act in a film argues
more with himself, fights a greater battle than any battle with all the
other bright committee minds choosing to give him static. The battle
within himself is part and parcel of what makes him a total film-maker.
He struggles within one mind. One hat fights the other. Often the actor
cannot stand what the director says. The producer thinks the director
is a moron. And the writer is disturbed by all three of them. The total
film-maker cannot lie to any of his separate parts and be successful.
There is a tremendous inner government within him, and his judgment
is severely examined by that inner government. (24)
Being total means being at war with oneself. In his films, Lewis finds
this inner struggle in, and projects it onto, the world, which he remakes
in the image of a multiplicity all of whose members (as at the end of
The Family Jewels) demand to be recognized and coexist in a state of
constant disagreement.
If the confessional aspect of The Nutty Professor and the self-reflexivity of films such as The Errand Boy and The Patsy have encouraged viewers to see Lewiss work as a distorted autobiography, a set of
mirror fictions in which he externalizes various aspects of himself and
sends them colliding against one another, his films make an equally
strong demand to be read as the most vivid and emotionally wrenching
American show-business hallucinations ever put on film: representations
and creations of a modern world in part naturalistic and plausible, in
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part fantastic and implausible, partly real, partly staged. In describing

them like this, I dont mean to say that they are films in which, simply,
anything goes (though Cracking Up comes close to such a condition).
Films such as The Bellboy, The Errand Boy, The Nutty Professor, The
Patsy, Three on a Couch, and The Big Mouth are comic masterpieces
that propose a rich and haunting combination of realms of seeing and
experiencing, of values that denounce each other without ceasing to
coexist within a single frame. These films do not, and are not made to,
compel diegetic belief or offer the reassurance of a cohesive narrative
controlled by a stable authorial agency. They set up, instead, a liberating and exhilarating confusion of roles and realms in which the author
is one of the figures that swim in and out of focus.
Notes
1.My translation. Unless an English edition is listed in the bibliography, all
translations from French are mine.
2.The version of Hardly Working that was released to U.S. television and
home video is missing about six and a half minutes of footage (available in European versions) from the last twenty minutes of the film. The missing scenes
make the progression of Bos view of himself somewhat clearer without fully
resolving the ambiguities of the film.
3.Lewis performed the same skitabout a movie fan who ingeniously crashes
a black-tie-and-tails premiereon the Jerry Lewis Show on December 27,
1957.
4.See The Patsy scripts dated December 31, 1963, and February 4, 1964,
in the Paramount Pictures collection, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and
Sciences Library, Los Angeles. (See also Benayoun 179.)
5.Order-word seems to have become the favored English equivalent for the
term mot dordre, as used by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari in Capitalisme
et schizophrnie.
6.We see this emptiness, at any rate, when the film is shown at or around the
Academy ratio; cropped to a widescreen projection ratio, as it is in the Paramount
DVD, the marginal space at the top and the bottom of the screen is not visible.
It might be assumed that this is how Lewis and the cinematographer W. Wallace
Kelley intended the film to be seen, but they were also aware that it would be
shown uncropped on TV and in 16mm. Whether or not the space around the
house is visible, it is clear that the shot is designed to emphasize the status of
the house as a movie set.
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9/11/09 11:14:33 AM
An Interview with Jerry Lewis
(The following interview was conducted on July 28, 29, and 30, 2003,
in San Diego.)
chris fujiwara: Could we start by talking about some of the
directors you worked with early on, like Norman Taurog, George Marshall, and of course Frank Tashlin, and what you learned from them?
jerry lewis: Ill tell you something interesting about Taurog.
Taurog taught me some of the most important information for me to
become a good director, and that was what not to do. Im trying not to
make it sound like he wasnt good. He was a good director. He knew
what to do and how to get it. But the way he did it, I learned not to do
it that way.
cf: What way was that?
jl: Cajole, curry favor. Deceptive. Not terribly sincere. I watched
all that.
9/11/09 11:14:33 AM
cf: What about George Marshall? Thats a director that people dont
talk about too much.
jl: George Marshall was very inventive. The beauty of George Marshall was his natural sense of humor, which he took to the set with him.
Suffice to say that Norman had a sense of humor, but he put that in his
locker. He came to conduct business. George Marshall came to play. Big
difference. And the fact that he had directed Laurel and Hardy [Pack Up
Your Troubles, Their First Mistake, and Towed in a Hole, all 1932]
put him in a place in my eyes that was quite special. Because Stan Laurel
would never have allowed him three minutes on the set unless he was
qualified. In the last five years of Stans life I spent maybe every Sunday
with him. If he said George Marshall was okay, youd better just go with
him. Which I did. Though I had no choice: that was our first director
[My Friend Irma, 1949]. I had no say in the matter. Later on I had say
in the matter, and I got him whenever I could. But he was wonderfully
innovative. Thats the best thing I can say about George. He did what
Joe Mankiewicz taught me as a director: Create an atmosphere for fun,
and youll get great work. Not fun ha-ha, but fun rather than stress.
Create an atmosphere for fun.
I said, JoeMankiewicz, that isyou created an atmosphere
for fun on All about Eve? He said, Absolutely. The actors have got
the material in their head. Theres no reason to keep it stress-like when
were getting set or rehearsing. I dont want them to go full-out in a
rehearsal, so I keep it light. And, boy, did he teach me! When you want
it on film, go for it. But if you rehearse it enough, youll get take one.
The magic of what youre going to do in comedy is that youre going to
want spontaneity. You dont get that in take fifteen. You get a technical,
regimented, robot-like piece of material. He was right.
You know, a lot of the work of the director, which Im sure you know,
is off the cuff. And not because theyre incompetent. Sometimes its
because they did not learn the most important part of the process is
homework. And because they did it that way a number of times, they
believed that they did it right. Well, I would like to show you some
films done by directors that winged it, and what they could have been.
They were wonderful the way they were. But they could have been
masterpieces with homework.
cf: Its interesting what you say about Marshall being more fun and
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creating a better environment, because it seems to me that of the two,

and it may have been a matter of the scripts to some extent, Taurogs
films seem to be a little better. Taurog directed, for example, Living It
Up, which is one of the best Martin and Lewis films, in my opinion.
jl: That was codirected.
cf: Codirected with you. I was going to ask . . .
jl: Yes.
cf: Especially the dance with Sheree North, where . . .
jl: Yeah. Definitely. And the big dance number with the hundred
girls. It was really well laid out. Norman Taurog was the kind of a man
that couldnt share a credit. And I wouldnt take it because of my relationship with my partner. But in talking about it in the confines of the
production, he didnt have any way of doing that. So I kept my mouth
shut, too. Not important. A credit among those producing the film?
Not important.
cf: Could you tell me a little more about in what sense you codirected a scene like the dance in Living It Up?
jl: I was very technically oriented. Norman was not. Norman knew
nothing about the camera, which always disturbed me. Thats almost like
a surgeon frightened of a scalpel. No different. And I made it my business to learn in the first year what this was about, you know. The first
year that Dean and I were on the lot, they couldnt find me. I was in the
camera department, I was in editing, I was in miniatures, in wardrobe,
in makeup, in post; they had to find me to get me to get on the stage and
do a scene. By the end of the second year I could thread a BNC camera.
I could lens-change any instrument, and I could edit any kind of sound
material on a Moviola, and make edits. I really learned fast. Norman,
not knowing technical, he would ... in the beginning, the first film I
did with Norman, I watched him say to a cinematographer, I want a
two shot. I later learned the reason I was upset about that was because
there are thirty thousand two shots. Which two shot? What kind of two
shot? Straight two shot, fifty-fifty? Over-on, over-on? Single pull? Single
to a deuce? Start the deuce, stay with the deuce? How many two shots
does the cinematographer have to choose from? I said No, thatll never
do. When I started to direct, I sat on that camera. I made the two shot
and built the marks and the moves for that two shot. And anyone that
didnt do that, couldnt be taught to do that on the spot, so I would very

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diplomatically say, Norman, this is a three-camera shoot. You need the

whole thing, cause theres a hundred girls. You need the deuce of Dean
and Jerry, but you better have a single on the fuckin money. Get a single
on the kid. And we got it all. The two of them, beautiful. Oh, and the
single on the kid is a transport. Get him for thirty feet, get Dean for thirty
feet. Transport. Well have all we want of the singles. I told Norman
about it;[he said,] Thats very good. He never argued with me about
the technical. Thats how it got done in many, many cases. Because to
direct the people and not complement it by the technical, what was the
point? Youre going to direct the people to do certain things and not see
it, or not be able to put it on film? So I was a stickler with that. I lived
on the camera.
cf: On a film like Living It Up, would you invariably go through
Norman Taurog with suggestions like that, or would you work directly
with the cinematographer?
jl: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You never do that. Thats going over
his head. Go to Norman. And very often, we had good cinematographers
that would hear me, and theyre doing this. [Nods.] You know, they understand completely. Im talking their language, and behind Norman,
theyd be going. ... [Nods.] You know, Someones telling me what they
want. The biggest thing in Hollywood is indecision. And great technicians need to be told, What do you want? What is it that you want me
to do for you? Give me a two shot. Well, now, hes going to make his
two shot. Isnt there a vision in your head, how this two shot should look?
Its either here, or there, over-on, way there, head to toe, what are you
talking about? So its the cinematographers choice. When the director
looks at the rushes, he knew he asked for a two shot, and he sees one,
and its fine. I battled that throughout.
cf: You did get credit on Money from Home, which Marshall directed, for the musical sequences, which I guess referred to the record
scene under the balcony and the scene with the animals. Was that the
same kind of situation, where you talked to Marshall about how you
thought it should be done?
jl: He asked me if I had any ideas of how to deal with that. And I
went to Dean and said, You know, this is something thatll work, and
Im gonna write the music for it. No problem. That was it. I never did
a film with any of those directors, even at the beginning, where I wasnt
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codirecting with them. On a very quiet, silent, behind-the-scenes level,

because I couldnt take the chance of alienating my partner.
cf: Did you also codirect with Tashlin?
jl: Everything. Everything Tashlin did with me, we did together.
Right from the first one, right to Hollywood or Bust. We did it together.
He was my teacher. But when he was leaving Paramount and he decided to retire, he wrote me a farewell letter; the salutation was, Dear
Teacher. Which was pretty nice.
cf: What specifically did you learn from him?
jl: I learned the world of cartoon. I learned that we could take a
great cartoon thats dead in the water, what we call dead in the water,
boatmen, a cartoon thats dead on the paper, no animation, its a cartoon,
there is a caption, and thats it. Frank believed we could make the cartoon
live. And not use a caption but fun dialogue. He taught me that. He also
taught me to look at the people that Im staging and put them in the
cartoon form in my mind and see how it looks. It was very interesting.
cf: Can you think of an example where the cartoon form is there
with the live person?
jl: In Cinderfella, a scene with Dame Judith Anderson, Robert
Hutton, Henry Silva, and myself. It was critical to the story, so much
information, it was a very important exposition scene. You know the term
exposition? Thats very rarely considered sometimes in a movie. Frank
and I were very strong about it, doing it all in this. So in staging it, I went
nowhere near it. I just was one of the actors, as Frank was staging it with
eleven moves of the camera. Eleven. Four people: nasty stepbrother,
nasty stepbrother, the kid, stepmother. Eleven moves. The brother in a
single, the brother in a double, the single-double, track-pan of mother,
mother crosses to brothers, mother crosses to the kid, mother crosses
down, comes back to original mark, brothers cross to mother, both go
up to. ... Frank said, I see the cartoon pages. [He makes a clicking
sound.] He saw this flipping. We used to call them O. Henry books. We
would hold them up to the light, the broads. Tillie Toiler was one of
them. Another one was Harold Teen. The first pictures got a rail on this
long, and a broad is coming to sit on it, but youd have to turn the pages
to see all this dirty stuff.1 And Frank sees the movement of the mother
to the sons, up to the kid, back to her place, the sons going, hitting her,
coming up, conferring, going back: he saw all this in individual cartoons,

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and he put it together, and goddamn if the scene didnt work that way.
It was supposed to be stoic [sic], and it was. We were kind of riveted in
the material, cause it was heated, and he wanted ... and he did it. It
was brilliant. But he first saw it here flipping, and thats how he staged
it. It was great.
cf: Is it possible to separate in a film like Cinderfella or The Disorderly Orderly what came from Tashlin and what came from you, or
was it too much together?
jl: It was way too much together. I mean, Frank wouldnt walk on
the set until he knew I was on the lot. It became as close as Siamese,
we were with the projects. Rock-a-Bye [Baby], we had such a love affair with that movie, because he had just become a grandfather, so the
babies meant so much to him. My being a new father at the time meant
so much. So we never left one anothers side on that movie. We really
worked together.
cf: In Cinderfella, there are things that remind me so much of you
and less of him, like the famous stairway scene, and the Basie orchestra
coming out, thats something that could be right out of one of your
movies . . .
jl: Yeah. I could tell you. ... In Cinderfella, I could tell you the
portions. Its unethical to diminish the other writer, as it were, but Frank
was the first to tell everybody that the whole ball I wrote from scratch.
I wrote the ball from the very first shot of the ball, their presence, what
was happening, the delivery of the Basie orchestra on the lazy Susan,
the kids entrance, the movement, the scene, the dance. It was my baby.
And Frank knew what I had on the paper and didnt know about what
the stairs were going to be. Because it was one take. And I knew what
I choreographed in my head to that music. I didnt even rehearse it for
camera. I made camera setups with Frank. I said, Youre gonna need
this, youre gonna really need this, this move is vital. So were up on
the crane for his entrance, and I needed the crane to move with him.
I didnt want to tilt or pan with him, I wanted to boom with him, to
keep his head and his toes in the shot, right down to here, till he does
that wild walk in front of the people. So once I had the camera set, and
Frank yelled, Youre ready? I said, Lets go. Hit the playback, and
down I came, and he stood by the side of the camera, and I saw, during
what I was doing, I sawjust joy in his ... he couldnt believe what I
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was doing. Chris, what I was doing was part of my body language, thats
all. I put music to it. But yet women saw that. The mail we got on the
sexual connotationWhat sex? That crazy bastard walking down the
stairs? Yeah, we got a lot of that.
cf: One film that you and Tashlin did, Whos Minding the Store?, I
read in an interview with you that that was Tashlins baby.
jl: Yes, its true. It was. He had a wonderful time with that. And I
couldnt contribute any more than the actor. It was his baby, so I left it
to him. Pretty much the same story with Disorderly Orderly. That was
another of his babies: I laid back and just took direction. It was wonderful.
Well, he was getting to know me pretty well, so he was writing for me.
cf: Moving on to the films you directed, there are moments in most
of them when one of the characters speaks directly to the audience, such
as the narrator at the end of The Bellboy, or in The Ladies Man, when
the sympathetic girl says that nice people are always needed, or in The
Errand Boy, the scene with the puppets, which nobody else would do.
jl: We call that a director with steel balls. I just loved what it did.
The stuff that I do thats really good is when I have the right intention. Its not necessarily the material as much as it is the intention and
the material. When my intention was to make it soft and sensitive and
loving, thats what I got out of it. Whether it belonged in the movie or
not. Youll get your naysayers to say, What was that for? What was it
for when Chaplin sat at the edge of the street and just watched people
walking by? I mean, what did that mean? It meant something: it meant
he wasnt going anywhere. I dont think that you can be so analytical
that you knock good ideas out of your brain. I loved doing the puppets.
I dont know why, but I did. Youre not the first to mention it, either.
cf: Thats a beautiful scene. Its a little out of tone with the rest of
the movie, but quite deliberately so.
jl: Absolutely.
cf: You handle it in a very realistic way. Its almost more realistic
than the rest of the movie.
jl: I shot it like I did two people in a scene.
cf: In many scenes in your films you speak directly to the audience,
like when Kelp on stage near the end of The Nutty Professor says, Youd
better like yourself, or the end of The Bellboy, You never know the
other guys story unless you ask, or in The Patsy when Ina Balin talks

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about how the bad things that happen to us make us better people. I
have a feeling that you put these statements in there because these are
things that you believe and you want to use the film to express them
directly to the people watching. Is that true?
jl: If you can be an influence on young people with something thats
meaningful, I believe in it. Sometimes I have been accused of being
morally theatrical. I hate that. Im moral. Whether its theatrical or Im
walking with my dog. I like to think Im moral. Theres a wonderful line:
I care about the demise of a man because Im involved with mankind.
My involvement is genuine, its sincere. I feel that if youre given a special
place in this life, you cant walk into a small room and close the door with
it. I think thats wrong. Because itll be of no consequence to yourself or
anyone else, unless you use that gift. Use it how? To get another gift? No,
you use that gift to spread the word that made you the recipient of the
gift. So Im kind of idealistic, mid-Victorian, completely old-fashioned.
I cant help that. Thats the way I am, thats the way I think.
I think that for years we have recognized the author by what he
writes. An author will alwaysyou will do the same, Chrisa writer
tips his mitt. If a writer would like to be completely anonymous about
the character and fabric of the man, dont write, cause you cant hide
in writing. I just believe it. Im sure there are people who will tell me
that Im crazyOh, well, what about J. D. Salinger? That was J. D.
Salinger. J. D. Salinger was Holden Caulfield. Dont tell me that was a
fictitious character out of the mind of his deep deep deep imagination.
Bullshit. He was Holden Caulfield.
So, what my writings were, in my conscious mind, were: I needed to
balance the comedy. I always got to the point where I needed to settle the
audience. And more importantly, to see that he [Lewiss character] is of
some consequence and not a fool. If they see him of some consequence,
everything he does will be that much funnier, and everything he does will
be that much more real, and the foolish and silly and mischief, and all of
those things that come down the pike in a film, will be accepted as valid
because of that exposition early on. You can wait till almost the middle
of the movie to do it. To protect that last four reels or five reels.
cf: Like you do in The Errand Boy.
jl: Yeah. I was very conscious of those moments because Chaplin
did it from beginning to end. It rode alongside of his genius. The com108
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9/11/09 11:14:35 AM
mon man and Chaplin. Chaplin being beneath the common man. The
Tramp. Chaplin could never have driven a message across to the public
without the Tramp. Proof: Chaplin got in trouble when he pressed his
pants. My own opinion. When I said it to Charlie, he said, Ive heard
it a couple of different ways, Jerry. But thats as succinct and as on-themark as Ive ever heard. I was talking about Monsieur Verdoux. I said,
Charlie, you couldnt be Tramp-like with pressed pants. You knew that,
and I know it. But I loved Monsieur Verdoux. I loved that character who
didnt have a chance. You put this character on top of thirty-two years of
the Tramp. Come on, you cant do that and expect it to fly immediately.
Same with Limelight. He said, But I had to break out. I needed to do
those things for my own creative juices. I said, Charlie, Im not damning you. What you did, I would have done in a minute. You stretched.
The very thing that a good comic director must do is stretch.
cf: Is that related to what you meant when you wrote that nothing
is more dramatic than comedy?
jl: That statement comes from doing comedy. In order to make
your audience laugh, you have to dramatically change who you are. I
wont trip over that piece of wood on the stage if its me walking there.
But Jerry will, or Stanley, or the Idiot, or whatever we call him in that
moment. He has to trip over it. Now, he has to turn into something that
isnt truly him, so were taking a piece of vanity and rubbing it out, a
little ego, burying it, sandpapering all that down, and bringing up all of
the gargoyles. Because in England they say what he does is grotesque.
The first time I read that, I was heartbroken, but they say, No, thats
a compliment. Okay. When I stand in front of an audience on New
Years Eve, lets say, years ago, and I see the young man and his girl,
man and his wife, girl, boyfriend, couples, lovers, all that wonderful
stuff ringside. Im standing up there alone and making a fucking fool of
myself to entertain all of them. Theres nothing more dramatic than that
moment, Chris. Its very dramatic. Because I have to call on something
thats not what I want to be at that moment. I want to be there with my
girl or my wife watching some other schmuck make a fool of himself.
But I never ever thought of what I did as demeaning. What I thought
of it was: other than me at that moment. So its very dramatic.
I love when somebody said, Did you ever think of doing drama?
What? Do you really think that Jack Nicholson does drama? He reads

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material, hes directed in the scene, and he plays it as a very good actor.
Theres nothing dramatic about that. Hes a very good actor reading the
words and not bumping into the furniture. When you ask a comedian
if he ever would do anything dramatiches done it from the day he
decided to make people laugh! Hes far more dramatic than any dramatic
actor. Sir Laurence Olivier said to me, I wish I knew your drama. He
knew what I was talking about. Red Skelton would have given his soul
to walk out on the stage accepted as George C. Scott was. Uh-uh, its
not in the cards. Thats not what they pay you for. Get back behind the
clown, mister. Very dramatic. You dont have to ask Sir Gielgud to be
dramatic; you ask him to act and learn the words and do the scene. Of
course its called a drama because its a story of a man who lost his son,
and its terrible. But its not as dramatic as this.
cf: Thats an extraordinary definition. I never understood that before. Does that relate to why in so many of your films you play against
yourself? In The Bellboy, youre both Stanley and Jerry Lewis. In The
Nutty Professor, youre the two people. Is that the drama in the comedy,
the conflict between . . .
jl: You have to havethe word is magic: conflict. You know, without
conflict, you have nothing. Because without conflict, you cant have a
rooting interest. And the thing that defines great comedy is when you
get an audience to root for the comic. Not just watch him fly by a scene
but hope hes okay. My children watching a Jerry Lewis movie would ask,
Is Daddy okay? if it ever looked like I was in harms way. My daughter
does the same thing, Is Daddy okay? But then shell ask her mother,
May I see a Jerry Lewis movie?
cf: You said you put in moments, like in The Errand Boy and The
Patsy, where we feel whats serious, what the stakes are for this character,
why its important to watch him apart from his being funny. Are there
moments like that in The Ladies Man?
jl: Where theres heart out there? His love scene with Pat Stanley,
trying desperately to be that young man that might be her choice possibly. His eagerness to please is a very very marvelous attribute in the
life of a comic because audiences can relate to that. Most everybody
means to please. Thats why we fear rejection so desperately, because
were trying so hard. But again, I write what I can at that one specific
time for the audience to recognize theres substance. You cannot have
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an audience believe theres substance going off the back end of a car
into a pool. Its far from substantial in the minds eye of the individual
watching. But moments like I try to provide are substantial. The equation and the dynamic isnt so that they recognize hes very bright; its
got nothing to do with intelligence. It has to do with his sensitivity as
a human being, and they can identify with that. And they root for him
because of that. And once youve got them rooting for you, you got it
made. Then you can do anything. You can do unfunny things that they
will enjoy because they already have committed to rooting for you, you
know. So its almost a wonderful skeleton key to a lock you can open all
the time. Youre doing a great physical bit, and youve done so much in
the film, and when I get a huge physical sequence that Im going to do,
that I know is very important, stuff before that has to be meaningful,
before I go to that big physicality.
The singing teacher in The Patsy, for example. I mean, I worked
months on catching those vases. Ill tell you exactly, it was five weeks that
I worked on it, before I would shoot it. Because I had to get the weights
and measures perfectly. ... It was such an important scene, cause he
was alone on the screen, and he was. ... The secret of what I always did,
was a man in trouble. Thats what comedy is: a man in trouble. To watch
him with those vases, it wasI mean, people in theaters applauded
it, which made me feel very good about it. I needed substance in him
before that, so it wouldnt look like just Three Stooges. Cause I hated
for any slapstick that I did to look like I just did it. I liked that it might
have taken a long time to prepare.
cf: Youre not afraid to go a long time with the scene, too. Its a very
extended scene.
jl: You bet. Im not afraid of that, because I also believe that once
we got the laughter in it, and if you can go further in the scene to maintain what you did earlier in making him substantial, you do that. Most
comic directors will go for the joke and cut. I like the tail-off of getting
him back into the norm, as it were. A lot of that was by design, but I
have to tell you, Chris, a lot of it was lucky. I did a lot of stuff on the set
that I would turn to people and say, I didnt want to do that. It worked
great! Lets do that. Why did I do that? My first assistant said to me one
day, Why the hell do you care why? You did. I said, Its important. I
may want to do it again sometime. He said, Youll never do it again

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sometime. But what you do the next time will be because you thought
something differently. And he was right.
cf: You mentioned Pat Stanley in The Ladies Man. I like her performance in that film, and I like how low-key the scenes between you
and her are. Theyre not played for laughs.
jl: No, never. Never for laughs. She was the umbilical between him
and real for a while.
cf: And it seems to me that Ina Balin in The Patsy has a similar
function.
jl: Yeah. Because there was such hysteria in the seven roles. I tried
so much quick movement, specifically to keep him cocoonlike among
them. And she was cool and smooth against all of their animation. Remember I had Everett Sloane, Peter Lorre, John Carradine, Phil Harris,
Keenan Wynnall five, directors in summer stock, in plays, in films, and
so on. Ive got five directors that Im working with, all of whom watched
very closely and had infinite respect for the director. It was wonderful.
But to get fire under their ass was almost impossible. I finally had to
confer with them. Let me tell you what you have to do to help me make
him work. Then it started to work. But I always kept InaRemember
that in his eyes youre a wonderful-looking chick hed love to ball, and
in your eyes, hes a wonderful kid youd like to help. Big difference in
those two bottoms of the people. She saw tremendous value in him as
the film went on. She saw things he did that had value, that he was not
just this bellman they put together and said, Lets make a star. Third
quarter of the film, she started to see him being fairly practical, reasonable, for the lack of a better word: normal. Otherwise it would never
have connected.
cf: You use character actors like Helen Traubel, Iris Adrian, Howard
McNear, Neil Hamilton . . .
jl: Great, great actors. Neil Hamilton, he had probably the most
experience of any actor in Hollywood.
cf: You encourage these people to do a very stylized acting, almost
over-the-top.
jl: Absolutely. Theres no way in the world that you can have them
play type. Youve got to recognize who theyre in the scene with. And
whos coming up after them. And what they must be substantially before
he comes. So in asking them to broaden their performance, and that
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trust me that I will smooth it, I wont let it go to that place that [creates]
discomfort for an actor, knowing theyre over the topIll take it to a
point between where youre fine, midway to over the top is fine for me.
But I need it all. Let me take it to that wonderful resolve that I know I
can use for the reason that Im doing it. Once you explain it to them, I
mean, its wonderful.
cf: You didnt have resistance from them?
jl: A couple of times Id get resistance from an actress like Katie
[Kathleen Freeman]. Katie was afraid that I was teaching her the acting
process. She never ever said it, but she gave me all kinds of static, and
I finally said to heras a matter of fact, I think it was on The Ladies
Man, when I said, Katie, Im not trying to teach you anything. Im real
ly trying to stylize you for what were doing here. And she heard the
word, and she locked in in a second. But I said, Im not satisfied that
I have verbally made you understand. I want you to do something for
me now. Let me print it, and let me do it a second way, and show you
what I mean. So I did an improvisation with her. I shot it. And then
I said, Now, lets do it exactly as written. Which we did. And I ran it
for her. And she went, Oh. I said, Is that all? She said, Thats all
youre gonna get. But: Oh. She saw it. Which I did with actors all the
time. I never showed them the good they did. I only showed them the
wrong they did. And immediately theyre seeing it. Words never did
it. Words werent clear. Because they immediately became, Whose
fault is this? Wait. Im not reprimanding you. Im saying its not what
I want, because youre bringing it something I dont need. And I cant
tell you what that is. So let me show it to you. Come. And Id run it.
And theyd go, Oh, yeah. I said, Lets drop that. Do it again: on the
fuckin money. Perfect.
cf: Was there ever an actor that you had to end up accepting a
compromise because you couldnt get them to do what you had in mind
for the part?
jl: [Pause.] I thought there was one. He just needed more spoonfeeding than most. Terrific actor. But not under my tutelage. He was
a terrific actor in things Ive seen him do. As a matter of fact, I grew
up with him. It was Edward Arnold. Remember the name? Had that
great laugh when he did Diamond Jim Brady. I thought I would lose
him. But my patience with an actor served me well. That was a movie,

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Living It Up, where I split the directorial chores. And I worked closely
with Edward. Only time.
cf: Did you ever give a line reading?
jl: You never give actors line readings. You say to them, The line
reading youre giving it is pretty shitty. Would you like to give me a
couple more?
cf: There are moments in your films when I think I see the actors
imitating you.
jl: I watched that very closely. I didnt want that to happen. If it got
through, I missed it. Actors will pick up your rhythm. Other than that,
no, I wouldnt allow it. If I saw it, Id dump it. Or if I saw it and it was
effective, and didnt appear to be what you thought it was, then Id keep
it. But I had a tremendous ... directorially, I had a fearless courage.
Which helped me tremendously.
cf: How would the fearlessness work with your work with actors?
jl: I was fearless in that I would dig deep in myself for them to see
that they can go a little way too. I never ever allowed them to think they
were wrong. Id always cutGoddamn fan! I would yell, Goddamn
fan is on, anybody know that? Nobodys looking. There was no fan.
While we stopped, Id say to the actor, By the way, do such-and-such
here, itll be better. Then Ill go the other actor that I had nothing
for, and Id say, That thing we talked about is perfect. Lets go. So
theres no one ever attacked in any way. If it got bad, Id move a scene
to another time. Take the actor to lunch. Id either fix it or recast it.
Thats what I mean about plutonium balls. Cause a director never took
a chance of having to reshoot something out of fear. Fear, my ass. I had
brought in, on The Bellboy, [an actress whom] I warned that her conduct was unacceptable. Snapping her fingers at members of my crew.
I said, Unacceptable, kid. Now please dont do it. Two days went by,
it was okay. Three days. Now the fourth day[snaps fingers]. I called
my production manager and said, Get her off the set, get her clothes
and send her back to Hollywood. He said, Youve shot four days with
her. I said, Who asked you for a fucking rundown? Do what I tell you.
Done. I jumped the board, went ahead with other scenes, called L.A.,
got a gal I knew would be fine, flew her down, I reshot four days, so
fucking what? But it was fun, and she was better. Everyone loved her.
I loved her, I got good material. Everything benefited by that move.
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Had I kept the other one, it would have been expeditious and thats
all. Sorry, not my movie. You know, I figure that the four days that cost
at that time a hundred thousand dollars, a lot of money for the budget
that I had, I was protecting a million. I think 10 percent insurance is
worth it; thats what I think. But thats unheard of.
cf: You must have been one of the only directors in Hollywood at that
time whod make a deliberate effort to cast very oldtime character actors
like Mike Mazurki, Vince Barnett, Benny Rubin, Jay Adler. ... These
were people that you didnt see in a lot of theatrical films at the time.
jl: Good actors. Nothing better than an experienced actor. And youre
never going to get the experience with an actor thats new. I felt so comfortable working with actors that I respected from what Id seen them
do in the past. It was a wonderful feeling for me to have the pleasure to
direct them. They gave me more, I cannot tell you. You embrace them
and give them love, theyll go through walls for you. Any actor. If they
see hostility or temperament, or disdain, you lose them. Theyre gone!
And you cant get em back with a present. Theyre the same as a puppy
whose spirit youve broken. Case closed. I know no better analogy.
cf: In The Ladies Man, both in the scene with the hat and Buddy
Lester, and the scene with George Raft, you start with a situation thats
basically realistic, and then it turns into something completely different.
jl: The black hat was written minimally just to introduce the date
for one of the girls. It was one of those things that I had written very
sparsely to include an outside character to the house. When we got into
it, there was sheer hysteria on the set. I couldnt contain the crew, I
couldnt contain me, and Buddy broke every fifteen seconds. There was
nothing we could do about it. It was one of those wonderful giggle days.
That I got the material I got was a miracle, cause had I called everyone
back tomorrow, it would have changed everything. It was one of those
wonderful giggles, and I think I was responsible for most of it because
I have such an affinity with the actor. It isnt that often that someone
else makes me laugh. When that happens, its glorious. Plus I was rooting so hard for Buddy to be good in it. Cause that kind of a credit is
important to a comic. So between rooting and giggling and nurturing
the scene because I cared so much about it, it developed into quite a
scene. Ultimately it wound up being what I think is a classic comedy

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scene, with the comic giving it all over to the other comedian. Which I
love doing anyhow, simply cause I learned that from Jack Benny. Jack
had two lines on one radio program. I said, You were practically not
in the show, Jack. He said, I was practically not in the Jack Benny
program. Which is a wonderful philosophy. Whether I was there or
not, theyre going to talk about the Jack Benny program. So Ive given
it all to them and let them have their moment. I learned a great deal
from my dad about generosity and giving to the other actors, because it
propels you into a place that you would not normally be in had you not
decided to be generous and selfless.
cf: The whole scene depends on Buddy Lesters reaction. What
makes the scene work is that sudden changehe starts out being menacing and tough, then he completely collapses. Which is totally unexpected
and wild. Did you conceive of that when you were writing it, or did it
happen when you were rehearsing and shooting it?
jl: I think it happened. As I say, I wrote an absolutely strategic scene
without any real hope that it would go any further than that, a pat scene,
for the reason I expounded on before. But a scene will very often take
you to a place you didnt figure on, and then you get all kinds of credit
for creating this wonderful thing. I find it difficult to understand an
awful lot of the stuff that happens, which I think is part of the creative
process. Im sure that you know what Im talking about. How many
times have you written something that you thought wasnot so much
inane, but minimal, and someone else would look at it and think it was
just spectacular? What the hell are you talking about? That? Well,
you didnt plan for it to be that way. You were hoping to get through it,
because you were staggering through a moment in time that wasnt really that productive for you, but you wound up finding it was better than
anything else you had done, and thats incredible when that happens.
cf: The scene with George Raft in The Ladies Man is similar in
that everything depends on the change in Rafts attitude toward you.
He suddenly becomes obsessed with the need to prove to you that hes
George Raft.
jl: In writing The Ladies Man, I had gone to a dinner party with
some mutual friends of Rafts, and I come to find out that hes struggling and having a tough time. And that breaks my heart when I hear
that. So I decided to write a scene so that I could pay him. He was very
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proud; he wouldnt take any handouts. Same thing with Stan Laurel.
Very proud, as Id like to think I would be in those circumstances. So I
really wrote what I thought would be a funny scene, while at the same
time showing the extent of the kids imagination. I always like to think
that that whole dance sequence was in his mind. Whether that came
across to the customer or not, I dont know. It just worked the way it
was. Of course, young people today that look at it dont know what it
means. They dont know George Raft and that he was in Bolero, or that
he was considered one of the best dancers in Hollywood. But it worked.
I loved it, it looked so rich and so movie-like [see fig. 16].
cf: I wanted to talk to you about the movie look of your films.
That seems to have been very conscious with you from the beginning.
Even The Bellboy, which is not a studio film, has . . .
jl: A lot of that. Almost taking people past the fourth wall. I love
knocking down the fourth wall, all the time.
cf: Which you do to great effect in The Ladies Man, when you pull
the camera back so we see the dolls house and the empty space in front
of it, and you do that in the Raft scene too, with the spotlight and the
empty space.
jl: I sit on the camera, and I block the shot. I have to see what I
want to see in the end result. In structuring a scene, I always kept fore-
Figure 16. So rich and so movie-like: Jerry

Lewis and George Raft in The Ladies Man.
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ground very important. Every aspect of the frame was important to me:
I filled it, and marked it, and watched it, whereas a lot of directors will
look at the focal point, the artist, the actor, the actress, the prop, dead
center of the frame. If its a joke, it better be there. If its exposition, if
youre building, if youre moving into a situation that you want clear to
the audience, you gotta do it all, you just have to do it all. I didnt learn
that from anyone; it was instinctive with me right from the beginning.
If youre going to point the camera, point it at what you want the people
to see. Dont hide anything, unless it shouldnt be seen.
cf: What was important to you about what this movie look? Why
is that such a big element in your films?
jl: Because as a child, I was enthralled with thinking about who
was watching. Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous. Remember the
film? Who was over here? Who was their fourth wall? The sea, the ship,
Tracy in the water dying. Its not real. He is not dying, hes not going to
die. So theres people here watching this. God, would I love to be there
with them. To watch it. I would have wanted to see it as I saw it first,
and then, could I see it the other way? It was always my desire to peek
behind the scenes. I was always behind-the-scenes-conscious and knew
that moments of behind-the-scenes for an audience just uplifted them.
Whether they thought about it or not, if you show it to them, theyre
going to see it. Theyre either going to like it or not understand it. Most
people love it. Or maybe in the back of my mind I always felt it would
be good to never take them so deeply that they forget its a movie. I
think David Lean needed to do that, so that youd forget it was a movie.
[Fred] Zinnemann would do that. Great directors I think did it most of
the time. Theyre careful not to make the audience conscious that its a
movie. Frank Tashlin had a fetish about green. Shrubbery placed in the
scene by a shrubbery man. He hated it, he never could get the pure color
of a grass lawn or bushes. So I said, Frank, take it out of the studio, get
what you want. We would do that sometime, just because he needed
to see that. He was obsessed with the ugly color of studio-prop green.
cf: Why did you want to remind the audience that its a movie?
jl: Well, I dont know that I wanted to shake them up, Hey, this
is a movie! But I was hoping there were kids out there that would feel
about it as I did. Thats all that was. I never wanted it to be so far and
away from reality that your audience would look at it as a distant faction.
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Whereas I had to do that in Cinderfella: I had to keep the audience over

there as a distant faction.
cf: Because of the fantasy quality of it?
jl: Yeah. I couldnt let Ed Wynn come in as the Fairy Godfather. I
couldnt let him come downstage too much. I kept everything at a place
where I thought was much more advantageous to the total film.
cf: Your movies are all very lavish. Theres so much emphasis on the
hugeness of the sets, not just The Ladies Man, but even in The Family
Jewels, where you start in the lawyers office and you end in the room
where she makes her decision. Those are huge sets, with beautiful floors
and walls and colors. This seems to have been really important to you,
to get a look of expensiveness and luxury into these films.
jl: Thats what Hollywood glamour was supposed to be about. You
dont think films would have been successful if they were all about the
apartment that a man and woman live in, in New York, a cold-water flat?
If everything was like that, we wouldnt have films. We have films today
because of 42nd Street, Broadway Rhythm, An American in Paris. Lavish
was part of Hollywoods glamour. You could buy a ticket to go to a movie
to see things you would not see in your real life. If you had a respect for
your audience to that degree, you would concentrate on it, and I did.
Plus I wanted to take pride in what I was doing. So if you look at the sets
in Three on a Couch, it uplifts an audience with great color.
cf: In Three on a Couch, especially the set of Chriss apartment, theres
so much emphasis on those colors, they really pop off the screen.
jl: Well, he was an artist, and I felt hed live that way. He was contemporary, kind of progressive, upscale, why put him in an apartment
that was down?
cf: Keeping that lavishness, that Hollywood glamour in that period in your films strikes me as almost a radical gesture because of
what was happening in Hollywood at that time. I think of your films as
almost the last survival of this Hollywood glamour. Even during the
sixties, everything had already changed, as you know better than I. Is
it possible to look at The Errand Boy as a film that comments on the
changes in Hollywood?
jl: Not in my conscious mind, no. I just played games with the system
to a degree. One of the best lines in the whole film was, Yeah, but the
hours are lousy. That was Bills creation, Bill Richmond. He came up

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with that line. I said, Shit, thats funny. I dont know that I was really
very conscious ... I was very conscious of doing a specific thing with my
work that I have to admit to you had been received by people like you on
a much higher level than I had anticipated. In other words, the work that
I was doing I thought was as good as I could do, but I never ever put it
in a place where I thought Id get eight best-director-of-the-year awards
around the world. I mean, the first one shook me, and I got shook every
time I got one. It was really incredible. Wait a minute, maybe what Im
doing aint that bad.
cf: I love the scene in The Family Jewels where you put on the
record This Diamond Ring, and the scene fades. That is in the same
kind of mood as the scenes with Pat Stanley in The Ladies Man, because
suddenly the film totally switches gears, and its just one man listening
to this record and having a reaction to it. A very personal thing.
jl: Sharing a good feeling with your audience is not always bad.
I dont know that they all recognized what you saw in it. Thats the
beauty of doing the kind of work you do where so much it is daring,
risk-taking.
cf: Seeing that film as a kid, that scene always struck me in that
film, not realizing it was a personal statement by you as the father of
the person who did the song. So that to me is an example of the scene
communicating beyond . . .
jl: What you optically see.
cf: Because of the mood of it, how quiet and real it is suddenly.
jl: The design that I would have is never just that one recording
and him playing it and so on. But Im coming from something to that,
and from that going to something. So I always did everything as an arc.
I never did this without hanging here and groping there. Any good
director that has any quality or any competency at all does not work on
the one setup. Hes coming from where he was and groping to where
hes going, in order for that to work right. Then there are directors who
do specifically that, nothing else, next, nothing else, next, ... I dont
understand how that works, but they do it. They get it done; the movies
made, you know. Whether its perfect, wonderful, or otherwise, I dont
know. But it annoys me to think that it doesnt take that much more to
do it right.
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See, not enough directors recognize that when you say roll em,
this happens. [He makes an aperture shape by unclenching his fist.]
Thats the lens doing this. And what its doing when you say roll em,
youre opening the eyes of the children in China, Russia, South America,
every time you say roll em, youre opening the eyes of a billion people
around the world. Are we being mid-Victorian again? I dont give a shit
what you call it, thats what youre doing. It was always meaningful to
me. The joy of roll em. But then whatever comes into it, I am there to
guide it. I am either going to let it be there, or I kill it. The word print
is very, very important to me. I dont even want to print doubt. To have
it on the negative anywhere. When Im in doubt, Ill print something.
If I dislike it enough, Ill burn it, you know, just get rid of it. But I have
almost a religious experience when I say roll em. If a lot of young
directors would know that or think of that, it would help them. I dont
think it would change their ability, but it would certainly help them look
at it more closely. I wonder how many directors understand that.
cf: Are there any directors that you sense in their films must have
known that?
jl: David Lean. Blake Edwards. Fred Zinnemann. Joe Mankiewicz,
without question. Billy Wilder. Willie Wyler. Thats a pretty good list.
They knew that. I dont know they did, but I would bet they did. And
interestingly, Mel Brooks. He knows that, he knew that. He was very
good because of that.
cf: Its interesting that you put such emphasis on this, opening the
eyes, because thats an image that happens in your films. Im thinking of
how often we see somebody putting their hand right up to the camera
lens, like at the end of The Nutty Professor, when hes taking his bow,
or in The Family Jewels, when the photographer uncle is setting up a
mount in front of the lens. That reminds me of your doing that [with
the fist]: youre controlling seeing and then not seeing and then seeing
again. Its very violent.
jl: Yeah. When you think of a violent director, Peckinpah. He did
that all the time. Sam was a brilliant director. Though what he did was
not my cup of tea. Kubrick was very involved with that. So we have a
very good list. I didnt particularly care about the things that Kubrick
did after Strangelove. I didnt need to see anything he did after that.
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The directors dream is to do one work in his lifetime, in his career, and
if you are lucky enough to be a director that does that one wonderful
work, youve done it, thats your career.
cf: You approach sound in a very direct, materialist way, where you
let the audience see and hear whats being done, and its almost as if you
were showing people how the movie is made. In The Bellboy, when he
goes through the models room carrying bundles of things, and he realizes theyre in their underwear and puts his hand in front of the lens, at
the same moment, you cut the sound.
jl: My theory is always, What you dont hear, you dont see. And
I dont believe in dialogue coming over the outgoing cut, to deliver
the incoming cut. I hate that. A man and a woman driving in an open
convertible, and theyre not talking, but you hear the argument of the
two children over that cut before you go to the scene in their bedroom.
What is that shit? Ive always hated that, cause it always felt to me like,
What are you, being chic?
The other thing, I was into dubbing more than any other director on
the lot. Most directors would dub their film in a couple of weeks. I ran
sometimes six weeks. Because Id let them know that sound was equal
to picture, and I didnt have anything with one of them gone. Am I going
to release this soundtrack without images? Well, Im not going to release
the images without sound. I was a stickler on getting everything exactly
the way I thought it should be. I believe you have to have both.
Ive never looped a scene in a movie, ever. Take actors out on the
desert, sound is bad, shoot the scene, go into dubbing, and mouth, and
put voices into the mouthing. Not me. My sound mand yell, We can
loop that, Jer! I said, Dont ever use that word on my set, kid, ever
again. We cant loop anything. If I dont get it here on this location, it
aint gonna be in the movie, so lets adjust. I was one of the first in films
to put lavaliers on. The wind for booms was terrible. I said, Get me two
lavaliers, okay? The bodies are gonna block out the wind. And damn it
if I didnt make the scenes that way.
cf: There are so many great sound things in your films. In The Ladies
Man, when theyre doing the TV show, Herbert inadvertently disconnects the microphone, and you dont hear anything, which is shocking in
a sound movie. I cant think of another film where in the middle of the
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scene suddenly theres no sound. Its experimenting with the medium

in a way thats pretty daring.
jl: I didnt think of it as anything other than, thats the practical application of the joke. If you take the mic away, nobody hears anything.
So I just included the audience into that scene. Thats really going
through the fourth wall. I had people, department heads, questioning, Will the audience understand that when you break the cable of
the mic in Ladies Man, are they going to understand why theres no
sound? I said, What are you talking about? You see what he does,
and you hear what happens when he does it. Oh. But then when
an audience saw it and they all approved, I would say to them, Well,
what happened with that, fellas? Oh, it was good, yeah. Critique in
committee was always my favorite thing.
cf: Talk about breaking the fourth wall: The Errand Boy is a compendium of scenes that do that. One of the big examples is the dubbing
of the song Lover. What struck me about the scene in the sound studio
is how beautiful and glamorous you make the singer. It struck me as
this gesture of love to somebody who is an artist: in the middle of this
fakery and non-art, there is art.
jl: I had no other intention than utilizing that as an important plot
point of that whole sequence.
cf: Then with the payoff joke when the movie is screened and youre
singing it, you draw attention to the fact that not only this was dubbed,
but it can be dubbed in this funny way, too.
jl: Something I always thought about every time I was on a dubbing
stage, I thought about that. I finally wrote it.
cf: You also like to associate a loud sound with a small source, like
Baby in The Ladies Man.
jl: Yeah, with a pretty good bark.
cf: Or the small transistor radios . . .
jl: And you hear this symphony. Thats just my comic sense of ...
I had written a joke that I wasnt ever able to shoot. I wouldnt even
digitalize it cause its too good a joke, but the joke was, Can you turn
off your pager? Guys going to see the Rose Bowl game on New Years
Day. You mind turning off your pager? Oh, no, not at all. And he
doesnt. Goes into the stadium, and theyre introducing the teams, and
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9/11/09 11:14:38 AM
you hear a pager. Then a pager. And then forty-five thousand pagers.
Drives the two teams off the fucking field. Theres no game. Its a fun
joke in my head. But theres a case of visual and sound, vital.
cf: Theres a lot of work with verbal humor in your films. Your
double-talk scenes, like the TV repairman in Its Only Money: there are
any number of scenes like that. It seems to me it must be impossible
to script that out.
jl: The only time you see my gibberish written is when the legal
department comes to me after the film and shows me what theyve
done phonetically. Beldondake Bumpman. They ask, Is Beldondake
Bumpman another language? No. Does it have any meaning? No.
Could it be another language? Possibly. They wont release the
movie until all of this is confirmed. A legal guy with a shirt and tie
comes with three assistants. Mr. Lewis, can I ask you a couple of questions? Sure. What is Banet-yech-gi-babap? That was a small town
in Romania that I went to some years ago. Really? No, Im kidding.
Every film they come to me with verifications. God almighty.
cf: A good example of that is in Three on a Couch, where your Rutherford character is talking about his understanding of Coleoptera.
jl: Editors went nuts. I cant write that. Ill show you the script, with
Coleoptera bit.
cf: Is that how you note it in the script?
jl: Knowing Im going to take it somewhere. Or Ill write what I
would call transient dialogue. Giving me the ... thats where I go. I used
to have wonderful people on the lot crazy. Whats he doing? Now they
see the receipts of the movie, or how well its been received, and they
dont understand. I brought Paramount eight hundred million in rentals.
A lot of money. Thats world, of course.
cf: You also have, in your films, a dialogue going on at the same
time as your monologue, and you can see everybody on the screen, like
at the prom in The Nutty Professor: you have Kelp doing a monologue
while Del Moore and Kathleen Freeman are talking.
jl: Counterpoint.
cf: Theres a moment like that in The Ladies Man, too, where
Kathleen Freeman is talking to you about what a good job youre doing, and you repeat to yourself the instructions youve just received
from Buddy Lester.
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Jerry Lewis
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jl: Counterpoint. The reason its good is because it protects a scene

from being trite [see fig. 17]. Because it is exposition. Its like dressing
up a scene a little bit with counterpoint. There were times that I didnt
write it that way, or I wrote it straight, and then the counterpoint developed in the staging. My most fun was putting the stuff on its feet.
Writing it is wonderful, and youre the only one that has the absolute
image in your brain of what youve written. No matter how may times
a stranger reads it, they havent the faintest idea where its going to go.
They think whats written is what theyre going to see. Which is the case
in most movies: you read a scene, go to the movie, its exact! Uh-uh. I
think I had maybe three or four exacts in my life that I directed. Only
in that Ive always written knowing the writer is going to be taken in the
hands of the director and hes going to rise above that material. I always
knew that. And even with thatI wish you could see a couple of my
scripts, shooting scripts, and see the material as written versus what you
remember on the screen. You will see the connection. Its not so that
when you see it you wont recognize it; youll know it immediately. But
you will see where I take it. If I couldnt take that, I wouldnt use it. Its
that simple. If I couldnt enhance it, I wouldnt use it.
cf: Would you say that you deliberately wrote a little loose, to give
yourself that room?
Figure 17. Counterpoint: Kathleen Freeman

and Jerry Lewis in The Ladies Man.
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jl: Exactly. Exactly. Thats a perfect word. By not snugging it up, and
it became vital to read it that way. I couldnt work that way anyhow. And
every director I ever worked with, including Scorsese, said, Please open
it up. You know, any good director wants you the actor to rise above the
written word. And to give an actor that freedom, hell go on his ass many
times, and a good actor very often doesnt want that. Hey, I learned
it this way. Dont you want what Ive learned? Yep, if thats what you
want to do, perfect. No problem. A director knows immediately, lets
get what I got on the page. When an actor says, Im so thrilled that its
loose, you got paydirt. At least the actor will take it to a couple of places
that might be viable, and if he takes it into the toilet, hes courageous
enough to go there again. You do that, its wonderful. Youre not going
to die. No ones going to kill your children. When you see a film being
made with a director thats so stoic, so tight, and so committed to the
granite written material, thats not fun. Youll get great actors to do that
for you, but then youll have that very stoic, tight film.
William Wyler had that wonderful ability to take static pages and
bring them to life. He did it with staging. Wyler was a master at staging a scene. If you look at The Best Years of Our Lives, God almighty,
what a beautifully directed movie. You know why I knew how good it
was? I was jealous. I always know when somethings superior. Thats the
wonderful part of our business, Chris: those of us who are presumed to
be excellent in their work are the last ones to know how good they are.
You know, I hate to make that admission, because it feels like a sign of
weakness, but thats what we are. Imagine this. Im sitting with a man
like Elie Wiesel, who, I mean, you sit with him, youre like sitting with
God, hes so wonderful. I said to Elie one day, Im not ashamed to
tell you that I need to get before an audience. And that Im envious of
you that do not. Because Im not as happy in my life. This was before
Sam [SanDee, Lewiss second wife, whom he married in 1983] and my
daughter, of course. But I was telling him, years ago, Im not happy in
my life unless Im in front of an audience. He said, Do you know the
why of that? I said, Yes, I do know the why of that. I am love-hungry,
and I have eight hundred mommies and daddies going [claps hands]
Good Jerry. Thats what actors are doing. They need to show off. They
need to take what they believe is a viable or interesting part of their
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chemistry, their talent, they need to go and present it. And then after
its presented, they need the adulation.
cf: It was important to you to show this in your films, to deal with
this dynamic and need directly.
jl: And a lot of times I didnt know I did it. Its people like you that
fuck up my life who tell me you saw that, you know. But its wonderful
because, imagine this. I did a lot of this work forty to fifty years ago.
And Im sitting today in the year 2003 with a young man, young enough
to be my son, who knows my work as well as I do, and yet hes going to
bring a spirit to me by his recollections that I never dreamed would be
possible. But you have no idea what that means to someone who yearns
to know that what he did was good. Its marvelous. Youre not going to
get this admission from a lot of people, because a lot of people wont
dig down and go there. I dont have a problem with it. I dont believe
youre going to think of me as a man thats demeaned by it, and I dont
believe youre going to think Im weak by it. But its true. And because
its true, and you understand that dynamic, then everything else youre
talking about youll understand even that much better. . . .
I know Jerry, I sleep with him, remember? I know him, I know that
son-of-a-bitch in and out. I know his needs, I know that without him I
wouldnt have food on the table. He works for me and very well. When
I talk about him in the third person, people look at you askance. Are
you fuckin schizophrenic? Yes, in the creative, yes. I can talk to you
much better about Jerry, being the creator of him, and Im going to be
seventy-eight years oldwere talking about the nine-year-old. The
nine-year-old within me. I have no compunction about telling everything
I know about him. I dont have a problem about that. Im not going to
sit down with you and say, Good morning, would you like a drink, and
oh, by the way, the depth of my soul. . . . Thats not how it works. You
wait to hear what the man wants. And if its interesting, and if he clicks
in, one with his personality, two with his concern, and three his care, I
go through the fucking wall. I do.
cf: In The Patsy, Hedda Hopper says: Youve come across somebody who hasnt yet learned to be phony. He felt something, and he
said it, which was real and honest. And now if you apply that to his
performance, youve got a great success.
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jl: I believe it. Ive gotten further with truth than a thousand people
hedging, fudging. When you learn, and I have, truth is immediate. Now.
Faster than now. A lie takes a week, and then youve got to remember
the son of a bitch. Most of the characters that I played had truth as a
foundation. Rarely would you see one of them deceptive for deceptives
sake. Cagey, maybe; cunning, maybe. Never deceptive. His truth was
part of his innocence. And certainly part of his naivety.
cf: Is that still true in Three on a Couch, where he plays the three
roles?
jl: In that deception, it was survival. That deception had to prevail
for the movie to work. You know, I wrote that with Sam Taylor. It was
kind of a stretch because I couldnt get Jerry out there. He wouldnt
come. I hoped he would, but he wouldnt come. Not in that frame.
cf: Youre not credited as a writer on that.
jl: No.
cf: But you did work extensively on the script?
jl: With the condition that there be no credit. And I was fine with
that. Sam Taylor was a very established writer. He never had worked
with anyone, and didnt mind, because he knew I was creative. And
he didnt know a hell of a lot about Jerry and his ability. So we worked
together very well.
cf: To get back to your point about truth. How does that apply to
the story of The Nutty Professor, where you have a man who becomes
somebody else? What is the truth that comes out of that?
jl: That there is good and bad in everyone. And since I was a kid, I
was never frightened at Jekyll and Hyde. I saw Fredric March, I think,
was he the first? I was a kid.
cf: 1932.
jl: So Im five, six years old. But my recollection is when Im older.
My recollection is around nine, and its a good recollection. Im sitting
there, and it was a rerun, it was called Popular Demand Rerun at the
local theater near where I lived, and on Wednesday nights they had
Popular Demand Reruns, which is the theaters way of saving on rentals, you know. Only one night. Three shows. Six, eight, ten, something
like that. I watched them all. I watched the three performances. And
Im telling you, I giggled throughout. Because I put myself in my clown
mask and watched it as a comic. I wanted to see if ... my belief at that
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time, and being so young, though I had already learned through my dads
work and my wonderful discussions with him, was that comedy laughter
and painful hate are really two factions that rub against one another.
That laughter is the reverse side of despair. But when you have one man
with two sides, one is good and one is bad, its the same premise, in a
sense. I watched the transformation and what he did, and for me it was
funny when he was chased down the street by the police jumping over
a fence. That classy gentleman, who was gonna marry this lovely lady,
doesnt jump over a fuckin fence, which you know is done by the stunt
man, cause the son-of-a-bitch was seven feet tall. Seven foot tall, and
he jumped it. Well, I got hysterical. And that giggle took me through
his panic of, Oh, God, I gotta drink the potion.
Im now talking about from the age, lets say I was ten, for round
numbers, okay, because I guess at about ten I had the mentality to examine, why do I like it that way instead of that way? I didnt think that of [I
Am a] Fugitive from a Chain Gang, I didnt think that in Public Enemy
Number One, I didnt think about it in Little Caesar, I didnt think that in
Wuthering Heights, you know. Why that? So I started to find out as much
as I could twenty years later, at the age of around thirty. Dean and I had
just split up. I was just thirty in 56. And my mind started going about
that project. I researched Robert Louis Stevenson as far as I could go.
[Robert] Benayoun helped me with that research. He was supposed to
have had a wonderful sense of humor. But whether he did or he didnt,
it was very apparent to me this was very serious writing about a very,
very serious notion that affected every man in the world. If he took it
to be identifiable to him, he would understand it, I think. Though there
would be the man who says, Im one person. Im a nice man, and thats
all I am. It stuck with me. For the next four years, I really started to
write. I wrote nine screenplays and shot the first. I kept polishing a turd.
I once said to a musician, You cant polish a turd. He said, You can if
you freeze it. Thats what I was doing. When I got ready to make it, I
went forward with the first writing. Cause I thought it was perfect. But
I wish you could see scripts two, three, four, down to nine. I mean, they
just got progressively worse. No rhythm, no continuity, exposition was
missing. I mean, I was looking to do things, and ... that wasnt me. I
dont write and edit. I write in original moments. Now, if I try to edit it,
I screw it up. If I repair grammar, thats no problem, my girls do that.

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cf: Was it because you were intimidated by the size of the theme
that you went through all these redundant drafts?
jl: Very possible. Because I knew I was taking on a heavy-duty classic, and will I be accused of ridiculing it. ... When it came time to do
it, youve seen the board for shooting, havent you? Day, add a day, add
a day? I took everything of Buddy Love and put it here. So that I had
twenty-five days of the professor. After the twenty-fifth shooting day, I
meet Buddy Love now. I procrastinated up to the very day that I had
to get him dressed. I hated it. Theres scenes I can show you where you
see it. I hated playing him. Whatd I tell you about a writer: he tips his
mitt when he writes something, doesnt he? I was really concerned that
I knew the depth of that ill-mannered son of a bitch. How do I know
that? Am I like that to know that? My sons would say to me, Youre
not like that to know that. Youre a very intelligent man, youve got an
IQ of 179, for Christs sakes, you know about people. Theyre trying to
convince me that Im not really getting into this terrible rut of, How did
I know that? You know, Stephen King writes something thats vicious;
doesnt mean he does that, but how does he know about it? I always ask
that question. I didnt play Buddy until the twenty-eighth shooting day,
and then I had to do it.
You know the thing that really distressed the shit out of me, the
people that said, Was that your, ah, your shot at your ex-partner? I
said, What the fuck are you talking about? I loved my partner. Hes not
ex, hes my partner. I loved him as much as I do my daughter. Whats
the matter with you? Well, we thought you were just gettin even. I
said, Well, you have to think what you think. But if you want to know,
Ill tell you what I wrote. I wrote about the man that takes a potion that
turns him into Monster. But a monster thats among us, not a monster in
the jungle. And the monster among us is coarse, crass, ill-mannered, illtempered, intolerant, pushy, crass, abrasive, loud, caustic. Thats the guy
I want to write. Thats what the beautiful little chemist becomes. That
was the whole notion. My partner would never look or act anything like
that. But anyhow when I explained it, everyone seemed to go, [dryly]
Oh, I see. Okay, thank you. Im going to go to everyones home that saw
the movie and explain this, right? But that was exactly my explanation,
because thats exactly what I was doing. If I had a mean streak in me
and I wanted to attack my partner, I could do it much better than that.
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I didnt have to disguise it, you know. I was offended that people would
think I would do that, but they dont know me, so theyre going to think
anything. But anyhow, I loved what I was able to see in the end result.
I made the movie I wanted to make. No regrets. If I shot it tomorrow,
I dont know that I would do it a hell of a lot differently. I might refine
some moves, I might tighten some things, I might delete a couple of
things, maybe add a couple of things. But on the whole, if they said,
Will you let this be the way it is for perpetuity? Id say, yeah, Im very
happy with it. I am.
cf: Its certainly a great film. What strikes me about Buddy Love is
that hes not all bad, and the audience is on his side a lot.
jl: Youd be amazed at the mail he got. From women. Handsome,
debonair, so charming. Im thinking, What fucking movie did they see?
Charming? Uh, sexy, great command, great presence? Im trying to write
a moron, you know.
cf: But the character is sympathetic at certain moments.
jl: Like where?
cf: The second time he comes into the Purple Pit, hes already drunk,
which is not attractive, but you start to look at the character a little differently, you say, this guy has a real problem. Hes not just somebody who
from a position from complete superiority and egomania pushes everybody
else around. Hes a guy whos troubled and has a drinking problem because
of it. And then you see him play the piano, alone with Stella, and you say,
Well, hes pretty sensitive, that he can play it that way.
jl: Well, part of that was the Professor within him. I always had to
keep the core within the Professor. Though we didnt see that come out
in Buddy Love. Because we couldnt; it would be totally confusing. But
we did know that he had sensitivity enough in both characters, to feel
for both characters. He had to know what Buddy did the night before,
though he didnt consciously know what he did. That gave me a couple
of pretty good pauses, how to deal with that. I remember one day I
screamed out loudmy son Ron was on the boatI said, Help me,
God help me, Im so mixed up. Read this. So I let him read a couple
of pages. He said, Its pretty clear to me, Dad. I said, It is? I read
it again, I said, Yeah, I guess so. You see, when his voice cracked, on
the cliff in the love scene, he had to know as the Professor that he was
getting into trouble. Or, as Buddy he had to know he was getting in

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trouble. So, I tried to keep them so distant they knew nothing of one
another, except when they were confronted, like the next morning, he
remembered by what she said, not by what he recalled. So it became
... picture that kind of a tennis match. Well, he knew that. No, he didnt
know. Oh, okay, but he understood. No. She said it. He accepted it. He
had to. He didnt have an argument for her. Oh, what happened with
you last night, professor? Oh, w ... [gibbering] Huh?
cf: Buddy Love is also sympathetic because the audience loves
him.
jl: Yes, which I didnt believe would happen.
cf: But also the onscreen audience. Hes an immediate sensation at
the Purple Pit [see fig. 18]. And youve got that closeup of Stella Stevens,
so gorgeously lit . . .
jl: She was gorgeous.
cf: And she looks at him with something like love, at that moment.
jl: Yeah.
cf: So its hard not to positively toward the character, no matter how
many negative traits he has, when you see he generates such love.
jl: The character had the ability to have you forget the ugliness
when he was in the present form of pleasantness. I cant take credit for
that, but thats what the audience did. They left the Polar-Bear Heater
Figure 18. The Nutty Professor: Buddy Love

(Jerry Lewis) at the Purple Pit
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at the bar when he was talking with some degree of reality for a moment
or two. I think he said to a waitress, Get me the drink, move it, but
then he softened. I think that people understood the peaks and valleys
of the character. I wish I could tell you I built him on peaks and valleys.
I didnt. I built him strictly with one point of view. All of those things
he is, I gotta have that.
cf: He also says something thats very true in the scene on the cliff
with Stella Stevens. First hes, Wipe off the lipstick, lets get started.
jl: Right. Thats my favorite Buddy Love scene.
cf: But then he tries a different approach, and he says, You know
darn well that everyone likes to be loved, admired. And thats perfectly
true, and thats said in different ways in your other films, and which you
must believe.
jl: Yes, oh, I do, of course. You saw evidence of that from me as the
man, in this set of circumstances.
Note
1.Lewis is describing something he also put in a film: in the airplane scene
in Cracking Up, the flight attendant offers Warren (Lewis) a pornographic flip
book in lieu of an inflight movie.
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9/11/09 11:14:40 AM
Filmography
Films and Television Programs Directed by Jerry Lewis

The Bellboy (1960)
Producer: Jerry Lewis (Jerry Lewis Pictures)
Distributor: Paramount
Director: Jerry Lewis
Screenplay: Jerry Lewis
Photography: Haskell Boggs
Art Directors: Hal Pereira, Henry Bumstead
Editor: Stanley Johnson
Music: Walter Scharf
Cast: Jerry Lewis (Stanley/Jerry Lewis), Alex Gerry (Mr. Novak), Bob Clayton
(Bob), Bill Richmond (Stan Laurel), Milton Berle (Himself/Bellboy),
Cary Middlecoff (Himself), Herkie Styles, Sonny Sands, Eddie Shaeffer,
David Landfield (Bellboys), Jimmy Gerard, Matilda Gerard (Fighting
couple), Jack Kruschen (Jack Emulsion), Walter Winchell (Voiceover
narrator), The Novelites (Themselves), B. S. Pully, Maxie Rosenbloom,
Joe E. Ross (Gangsters), Larry Best (Apple man), Roy Sedley (Man at
pool), Jack Durant (Mr. Manville), Guy Rennie (Mr. Carter)
Black and white
72 min.
The Ladies Man (1961)
Producer: Jerry Lewis (York Pictures)
Screenplay: Jerry Lewis, Bill Richmond
Photography: W. Wallace Kelley
Art Directors: Hal Pereira, Ross Bellah
Editor: Stanley Johnson
9/11/09 11:14:40 AM
Cast: Jerry Lewis (Herbert H. Heebert/Herberts mother), Helen Traubel

(Helen Wellenmelon), Kathleen Freeman (Katie), Pat Stanley (Fay),
Buddy Lester (Willard C. Gainsborough), George Raft (Himself),
Hope Holiday (Miss Anxious), Lynn Ross (Miss Vitality), Sylvia Lewis
(Miss Cartilage), Madlyn Rhue (Miss Intellect), Harry James and His
Orchestra (Themselves), Westbrook Van Voorhis (Himself), Alex Gerry
(TV producer), Doodles Weaver (Sound man), Jack Kruschen (Graduation
emcee), Kenneth MacDonald (Herberts father), Beverly Wills (Miss
Hypochondriac), Ann McCrea (Miss Sexy Pot), Caroline Richter (Miss
Southern Accent), Mary La Roche, Daria Massey, Lillian Briggs, Patricia
Blair, Francesca Bellini (Boarders), Vicki Benet (French singer), Del
Moore (Announcer), Mary LeBow (French maid)
Technicolor
106 min.
Permanent Waves (1962?)
Unsold TV pilot.
Cast: Hope Holiday, Kathleen Freeman
25 min. (approx.)
The Errand Boy (1962)
Producer: Ernest D. Glucksman (Jerry Lewis Productions)
Art Director: Hal Pereira, Arthur Lonergan
Editor: Stanley E. Johnson
Cast: Jerry Lewis (Morty S. Tashman/Second poster hanger), Brian Donlevy
(Tom Paramutual), Howard McNear (Mr. Sneak), Stanley Adams
(Mailroom manager), Dick Wesson (Assistant director), Robert Ivers (New
York director), Pat Dahl (Miss Carson), Rene Taylor (Miss Giles), Rita
Hayes (Singer), Isobel Elsom (Irma Paramutual), Sig Ruman (Baron),
Kathleen Freeman (Helen Paramutual), Iris Adrian (Anastasia), Fritz Feld
(Buzzbie), Felicia Atkins (Serina), Doodles Weaver (Weaver), Kenneth
MacDonald (Fumble), Joey Forman (Jedson), Paul and Mary Ritts
(Magnolia marionettists), Milton Frome (Mr. Greenback), Dave Landfield
(Lance), Del Moore (Himself), Benny Rubin (Mr. Wabenlottnee), Regis
Toomey (Man in projection room), Richard Bakalyan (Director), William
Wellman Jr. (Star in love scene), Dan Blocker, Lorne Greene, Michael
Landon, Pernell Roberts (Themselves), the Dover Basketeers (Basketball
136
Filmography
9/11/09 11:14:40 AM
players), Joe Besser (Man in projection room), Mike Mazurki (Stunt man
in blond wig), Bill Richmond (Monocled man in elevator), Mike Ross (Man
in elevator), Mary Treen (Commissary cashier), Herbert Vigran (Cigar
smoker in elevator)
Black and white
92 min.
The Nutty Professor (1963)
Producer: Ernest D. Glucksman (Jerry Lewis Productions)
Art Directors: Hal Pereira, Walter Tyler
Editor: John Woodcock
Cast: Jerry Lewis (Professor Julius Kelp/Buddy Love/Kelp as baby), Stella
Stevens (Stella), Del Moore (Dr. Warfield), Kathleen Freeman (Miss
Lemon), Howard Morris (Elmer Kelp), Elvia Allman (Edwina Kelp),
Henry Gibson (Gibson), Med Flory (Worshefski), Norman Alden, Julie
Parrish, Skip Ward, David Landfield, Francine York, Celeste Yarnall
(Students), Milton Frome (Dr. M. Sheppard Leevee), Buddy Lester
(Bartender), Les Brown and His Band of Renown (Themselves), Murray
Alper (Gym attendant), Michael Ross (Weightlifter), Richard Kiel, Hugh
Cannon (Tall men in gym), Gavin Gordon (Clothes salesman)
Technicolor
107 min.
The Patsy (1964)
Producer: Ernest D. Glucksman (Jerry Lewis Productions/Patti Enterprises)
Art Directors: Hal Pereira, Carey ODell
Editors: John Woodcock, Arthur P. Schmidt
Music: David Raksin
Cast: Jerry Lewis (Stanley Belt), Ina Balin (Ellen Betz), Everett Sloane (Caryl
Ferguson), Phil Harris (Chic Wymore), Keenan Wynn (Harry Silver), John
Carradine (Bruce Arden), Peter Lorre (Morgan Heywood), Hans Conreid
(Professor Mueller), Richard Deacon (Sy Devore), Phil Foster (Mayo
Sloan), Del Moore (Policeman), Nancy Kulp (Helen), Hedda Hopper,
Ed Sullivan, Ed Wynn, Mel Torme, Rhonda Fleming, Lloyd Thaxton,
Filmography
137
9/11/09 11:14:40 AM
George Raft, the Step Brothers (Themselves), Benny Rubin (Waiter), Fritz
Feld (Matre d), Dick Bakalyan, Norman Alden, Robert Ivers (Men at
dance), Scatman Crothers (Shoeshine), Neil Hamilton (Barber), Lorraine
Crawford (Manicurist), Bill Richmond (Pianist), Mantan Moreland
(Barbershop porter), Quinn OHara (Cigarette girl), Richard Gehman,
Vernon Scott (Themselves)
Technicolor
101 min.
A Little Fun to Match the Sorrow (1965)
Episode of the TV series Ben Casey
Producer: Wilton Schiller (Bing Crosby Productions)
Broadcasting network: ABC-TV
Teleplay: Chester Krumholz
Photography: Ted Voigtlander
Art Director: Rolland M. Brooks
Editor: Mike Pozen
Music: Johnny Williams
Cast: Vincent Edwards (Dr. Ben Casey), Jerry Lewis (Dr. Dennis Green),
Dianne Foster (Karen Fischer), Sam Jaffe (Dr. Zorba), Harry Landers
(Dr. Ted Hoffman), Bettye Ackerman (Dr. Maggie Graham), Jeanne
Bates (Miss Wills), James Best (Dr. Joe Sullivan), Tige Andrews (Dave
McClusky), Robert H. Harris (Mr. Burns), Svea Grunfeld (Helen Fenton),
Todd Garretson (Larry)
Black and white
52 min.
The Family Jewels (1965)
Producer: Jerry Lewis (Jerry Lewis Enterprises)
Art Directors: Hal Pereira, Jack Poplin
Editor: John Woodcock
Music: Pete King
Cast: Jerry Lewis (Willard Woodward/Bugsy Peyton/James Peyton/Everett
Peyton/Julius Peyton/Captain Eddie Peyton/Skylock Peyton), Donna
Butterworth (Donna Peyton), Sebastian Cabot (Dr. Matson), Neil
Hamilton, Jay Adler (Attorneys), Robert Strauss (Pool hustler), Gene
Baylos (Circus clown), Marjorie Bennett, Ellen Corby, Renie Riano,
Jesslyn Fax, Frances Lax (Airplane passengers), Anne Baxter (Hostess),
138
Filmography
9/11/09 11:14:40 AM
Del Moore (Butler), Gerald Mohr, William Wellman Jr. (Dinner guests),
Bill Richmond (Cab driver), Vince Barnett (Man with antique car), Gary
Lewis and the Playboys (Themselves), Milton Frome (Pilot), Benny Rubin
(Sign painter), Herbie Faye (Joe), John Lawrence (Chief petty officer),
Francine York (Airline hostess), John Hubbard (Pilot), Michael Ross
(Guard), Douglas Deane (Model)
Technicolor
100 min.
Three on a Couch (1966)
Producer: Jerry Lewis (Jerry Lewis Productions)
Distributor: Columbia
Screenplay: Bob Ross, Samuel A. Taylor, based on a story by Arne Sultan and
Marvin Worth
Photography: W. Wallace Kelley, Robert Bronner
Art Director: Leo K. Kuter
Editor: Russel Wiles
Music: Louis Brown
Cast: Jerry Lewis (Christopher Pride/Warren/Ringo Raintree/Rutherford/
Heather), Janet Leigh (Dr. Elizabeth Acord), James Best (Dr. Ben Mizer),
Mary Ann Mobley (Susan Manning), Gila Golan (Anna Jacque), Leslie
Parrish (Mary Lou Mauve), Kathleen Freeman (Murphy), Buddy Lester
(Drunk), Renzo Cesana (Ambassador), Fritz Feld (Attach), Danny
Costello (Singer), Renie Riano (Green Stamps)
Pathecolor
109 min.
The Big Mouth (1967)
Distributor: Columbia
Screenplay: Jerry Lewis, Bill Richmond, based on a story by Bill Richmond
Art Director: Lyle Wheeler
Music: Harry Betts
Cast: Jerry Lewis (Gerald Clamson/Sid Valentine), Susan Bay (Suzie
Cartwright), Harold J. Stone (Thor), Charlie Callas (Rex), Buddy Lester
(Studs), Del Moore (Mr. Hodges), Jeannine Riley (Bambi Berman),
Leonard Stone (Fong), John Nolan (Webster), Paul Lambert (Moxie),
Frank De Vol (Narrator), Vern Rowe (Gunner), Dave Lipp (Lizard),
Vincent Van Lynn (Fancher), Mike Mahoney, Walter Kray (Detectives),
Filmography
139
9/11/09 11:14:40 AM
Eddie Ryder (Specs), Colonel Harland Sanders (Himself), William

Wellman Jr. (Harold), George Takei (Worker in Fongs lab), Florence Lake
(Little old lady), Vince Barnett (Man at phone booth)
Pathecolor
107 min.
One More Time (1970)
Producer: Milton Ebbins (ChrisLaw-Trace-Mark)
Distributor: United Artists
Screenplay: Michael Pertwee
Photography: Ernest W. Steward
Production Designer: Jack Stevens
Editor: Bill Butler
Music: Les Reed
Cast: Sammy Davis Jr. (Charlie Salt), Peter Lawford (Chris Pepper/Lord
Sydney Pepper), Maggie Wright (Miss Tomkins), Leslie Sands (Inspector
Crock), John Wood (Figg), Sydney Arnold (Tombs), Edward Evans
(Gordon), Percy Herbert (Mander), Dudley Sutton (Wilson), Esther
Anderson (Billie), Anthony Nicholls (Candler), Allan Cuthbertson
(Belton), Moultrie Kelsall (Minister), Glyn Owen (Dennis), Lucille Soong
(Kim Lee), Cyril Luckham (Magistrate), Bill Maynard (Jenson), David
Trevena (Gene Abernathy), Norman Mitchell (Sergeant Smith), Richard
Goolden (Ninth local), Joanna Wake (Claire Turpington-Mellish), Julian
DAlbie (Lord Turpington-Mellish), Gladys Spencer (Lady TurpingtonMellish), Geoffrey Morris (Police doctor), Norman Pitt, George McGrath
(Country gentlemen), Mischa De La Motte (Matre d), Walter Horsbrugh
(Clerk of the court), John Nettles (Dixon), Peter Reeves (Policeman),
Juliette Bora, Florence George, Lorraine Hall, Thelma Neal, Amber
Dean Smith, Carmel Stratton (Salt and Pepper Girls), Peter Cushing (Dr.
Frankenstein), Christopher Lee (Dracula)
DeLuxe Color
93 min.
Which Way to the Front? (1970)
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Screenplay: Gerald Gardner, Dee Caruso, from a story by Gerald Gardner
Art Director: John Beckman
Music: Louis Y. Brown
140
Filmography
9/11/09 11:14:41 AM
Cast: Jerry Lewis (Brendan Byers III/Field Marshal Eric Kesselring), Jan
Murray (Sid Hackle), John Wood (Finkel), Steve Franken (Peter Bland),
Dack Rambo (Terry Love), Sidney Miller (Adolf Hitler), Robert Middleton
(Colonico), Willie Davis (Lincoln), Kaye Ballard (Mayors wife), Harold J.
Stone (General Buck), Paul Winchell (Schroeder), Myron Healey (Major),
Fritz Feld (Von Runstadt), Joe Besser (Dock Master), Danny Dayton
(Man in car), Bobo Lewis (Blands wife), Kathleen Freeman (Blands
mother), George Takei (Yamashita), Martin Kosleck (German submarine
commander), Benny Rubin (Field marshal in conspiracy), Mike Mazurki
(Rocky), William Wellman Jr. (Mosgrove), Ronald Lewis (Lieutenant
Levitch), Neil Hamilton (Chief of staff), Bob Lauher (Sergeant), Milton
Frome (Executive), Gary Crosby, Artie Lewis, Mickey Manners (SS
guards), Kenneth MacDonald (Admiral), Herbert Vigran (Officer), Henry
Corden (Thug), Richard Loo, Teru Shimada (Japanese naval officers)
Technicolor
96 min.
In Dreams They Run (1970)
Episode of the TV series The Bold Ones (The New Doctors)
Producer: Joel Rogosin (Harbour Productions Unlimited/UTV)
Broadcasting network: NBC-TV
Teleplay: Don Tait, Sandy Stern, from a story by Don Tait
Photography: Gerald Perry Finnerman
Art Director: John E. Chilberg, II
Editor: Budd Small
Music: Dave Grusin
Cast: John Saxon (Dr. Theodore Stuart), E. G. Marshall (Dr. David Craig),
David Hartman (Dr. Paul Hunter), Joanne Linville (Anne Sorenson),
Arch Johnson (Frank Sorenson), Lincoln Kilpatrick (Gil Dodds), Ella
Edwards (Babe Dodds), Jason Karpf (Davey Sorenson), Del Moore
(Announcer), Robbie MacDonald (Warren McRae), Anne Whitfield
(Milly), Kathleen Freeman, Eve Brent, Cecile Ozorio, Alyscia Maxwell,
Christine Nelson (Nurses)
Color
55 min.
Hardly Working (1980)
Producers: James J. McNamara, Igo Kantor
Distributor: Twentieth CenturyFox
Screenplay: Michael Janover, Jerry Lewis, from an original story by Michael
Janover
Filmography
141
9/11/09 11:14:41 AM
Photography: James Pergola

Art Director: Don Ivey
Editor: Michael Luciano
Music: Morton Stevens
Cast: Jerry Lewis (Bo Hooper/Woman outside hotel), Susan Oliver (Claire
Trent), Roger C. Carmel (Robert Trent), Deanna Lund (Millie), HaroldJ.
Stone (Frank Loucazi), Steve Franken (Steve Torres), Buddy Lester
(Claude Reed), Leonard Stone (Ted Mitchell), Jerry Lester (Slats), Billy
Barty (Sammy), Alex Hentelhoff (J. Balling), Britt Leach (Gas station
manager), Peggy Mondo (Woman in restaurant), Amy Krug (Michele
Trent), Steven Baccus (Peter), Tommy Zibelli II (Bobby Trent), Buffy Dee
(C.B.), Lou Marsh (Tony the clown), Tony Adams (Eddie the clown), Bob
May (Clown), Angela Bomford (Curio lady), Jack McDermott (Banker),
Cary Hoffman (Waiter), Jack Wakefield (Disco manager), Jordana Wester
(Lady in house), John Rice, Greg Rice (Midget clowns), SanDee Pitnick
(Disco dancer)
Color
91 min.
Cracking Up (Smorgasbord; 1983)
Producers: Peter Nelson, Arnold Orgolini (Orgolini-Nelson Productions)
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Photography: Gerald Perry Finnerman
Production Designer: Tracy Bousman
Set Designers: Elizabeth Bousman, Richard McKenzie, Robert Bacon
Editor: Gene Fowler Jr.
Music: Morton Stevens
Cast: Jerry Lewis (Warren Nefron/Jacques Nefron/Warrens father/Bank
robber/Dr. Peck), Herb Edelman (Dr. Jonas Pletchick), Foster Brooks
(Pilot), Zane Buzby (Waitress/Valet), Dick Butkus (Antismoking therapist),
Francine York (Marie Du Bois), John Abbott (Surgeon), Bill Richmond
(Schoolmate/Driver), Buddy Lester (Passenger), Milton Berle (Woman
patient), Sammy Davis Jr. (Himself), Michael Ross (Prison guard)
Color
89 min.
Boy (1990)
Episode in How Are the Kids? / Comment vont les enfants?
Producer: C91 Communications
Screenplay: Jerry Lewis
142
Filmography
9/11/09 11:14:41 AM
Photography: Mike McGowan, John Winner

Editors: Roy Benson, Larry Moten
Music: George Delerue
Cast: Isaac Lidsky, Ivory Sommers, Bob Thompson, Virginia Thompson
Color
8 min.
Other Films Starring Jerry Lewis
This list contains only the theatrical feature films in which Jerry Lewis
appears in a principal role. Cameo appearances and TV appearances
are not represented. Films produced by Lewiss production companies
are marked by an asterisk (*).
My Friend Irma (1949)
Director: George Marshall
Producer: Hal B. Wallis (Paramount)
My Friend Irma Goes West (1950)
Director: Hal Walker
At War with the Army (1950)*
Producers: Fred F. Finklehoffe, Abner J. Greshler (York Pictures)
Thats My Boy (1951)
Sailor Beware (1951)
Jumping Jacks (1952)
Director: Norman Taurog
The Stooge (1953)
Filmography
143
9/11/09 11:14:41 AM
Scared Stiff (1953)

The Caddy (1953)*
Producer: Paul Jones (York Pictures)
Money from Home (1954)
Special material in song numbers staged by Jerry Lewis
Living It Up (1954)*
Three-Ring Circus (1954)
Director: Joseph Pevney
Youre Never Too Young (1955)*
Artists and Models (1955)
Director: Frank Tashlin
Pardners (1956)*
Hollywood or Bust (1956)
The Delicate Delinquent (1957)*
Director: Don McGuire
144
Filmography
9/11/09 11:14:41 AM
The Sad Sack (1957)

Rock-a-Bye Baby (1958)*
The Geisha Boy (1958)*
Dont Give Up the Ship (1959)
Visit to a Small Planet (1960)
Cinderfella (1960)*
Producer: Jerry Lewis (Jerry Lewis Pictures)
Its Only Money (1962)*
Producer: Jerry Lewis (York Pictures/Jerry Lewis Productions)
Whos Minding the Store? (1963)*
Producer: Jerry Lewis (York Pictures/Jerry Lewis Productions)
The Disorderly Orderly (1964)*
Producer: Paul Jones (York Pictures/Jerry Lewis Productions)
Boeing Boeing (1965)
Director: John Rich
Filmography
145
9/11/09 11:14:41 AM
Way ... Way Out (1966)*

Director: Gordon Douglas
Producer: Malcolm Stuart (Jerry Lewis Productions/Coldwater Productions/
Way Out Co.)
Dont Raise the Bridge, Lower the River (1968)
Director: Jerry Paris
Producer: Walter Shenson (Walter Shenson Productions)
Hook, Line, and Sinker (1969)*
The King of Comedy (1983)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Producer: Arnon Milchan (Embassy International Pictures)
Slapstick (of Another Kind) (1984)
Director: Steven Paul
Producer: Steven Paul (International Film Marketing)
Retenez moi ... ou je fais un malheur (Hold me back or Ill have an accident;
1984)
Director: Michel Grard
Producers: Pierre Kalfon, Michel Grard (Imacit/Coline)
Par o tes rentr? On tas pas vu sortir (How did you get in? We didnt see
you leave; 1984)
Director: Philippe Clair
Producer: Tarak Ben Ammar (Carthago)
Arizona Dream (1993)
Director: Emir Kusturica
Producers: Yves Marmion, Claudie Ossard (Canal+/Constellation/Hachette
Premire/UGC)
Funny Bones (1995)
Director: Peter Chelsom
Producers: Peter Chelsom, Simon Fields (Hollywood Pictures)
146
Filmography
9/11/09 11:14:42 AM
Bibliography
The following represents a small selection from the vast literature on Lewis.
Extensive bibliographies can be found in the books by Benayoun, Krutnik, and
Levy.
Aumont, Jacques, Jean-Louis Comolli, Andr S. Labarthe, Jean Narboni, and
Sylvie Pierre. Petit lexique des termes lewisiens. Cahiers du cinma 197
(December 1967/January 1968): 5863.
Benayoun, Robert. Bonjour Monsieur Lewis. Paris: Eric Losfeld, 1972.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
. Literature and the Right to Death. In The Station Hill Blanchot Reader:
Fiction and Literary Essays. Ed. George Quasha. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1999. 35999.
Bogdanovich, Peter. Pieces of Time: Peter Bogdanovich on the Movies. New
York: Arbor House, 1973.
. Who the Hells in It: Portraits and Conversations. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2004.
Bukatman, Scott. Paralysis in Motion: Jerry Lewiss Life as a Man. In Comedy/
Cinema/Theory. Ed. Andrew S. Horton. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991. 188205.
Comolli, Jean-Louis. Chacun son soi. Cahiers du cinma 197 (December
1967/January 1968): 5154.
Coursodon, Jean-Pierre. Jerry Lewis. In American Directors. Vol. 2. Ed. JeanPierre Coursodon and Pierre Sauvage. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983. 189
200.
Daney, Serge. Which Way to the Front? Cahiers du cinma 228 (March/April
1971): 6061.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinma 2: Limage temps. Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1985.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. Capitalisme et schizophrnie: Mille plateaux.
Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1980.
9/11/09 11:14:42 AM
Durgnat, Raymond. The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American
Image. New York: Horizon Press, 1970.
Garcia, Roger, ed. Frank Tashlin. Paris: Yellow Now, 1994.
Hamrah, A. S. Aftermirth. Bunnyhop 8 (1997): 2931.
. Thus Spake Cinderfella. In The Factsheet Five Zine Reader. Ed. R.Seth
Friedman. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997. 6062.
Johnston, Claire, and Paul Willemen, eds. Frank Tashlin. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Film Festival, 1973.
Kite, B. The Jerriad: A Clown Painting. Part 1. The Believer 7 (October 2003):
4958; Part 2. The Believer 8 (November 2003): 5260.
Krl, Petr. Le Burlesque, ou Morale de la tarte la crme. Paris: ditions Ramsay, 2007.
Krutnik, Frank. Inventing Jerry Lewis. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.
. Sex and Slapstick: The Martin and Lewis Phenomenon. In Enfant
Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film. Ed. Murray Pomerance. New York:
New York University Press, 2002. 10921.
Leutrat, Jean-Louis, and Paul Simonci. Jerry Lewis. Premier Plan no. 36. Lyon:
SERDOC, 1965.
Levy, Shawn. King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis. New York: St.
Martins Press, 1996.
Lewis, Jerry. The Total Film-Maker. New York: Random House, 1971.
Lewis, Jerry, and Herb Gluck. Jerry Lewis in Person. New York: Atheneum,
1982.
Lewis, Jerry, and James Kaplan. Dean and Me (A Love Story). New York: Doubleday, 2005.
Mago. Souvenirs dun film qui nest jamais sorti. Rev. of The Day the Clown
Cried. Trans. Catherine Masson. Positif 447 (May 1998): 6568.
Marx, Karl. Estranged Labor. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844. Trans. Martin Milligan. Ed. Dirk J. Struik. New York: International
Publishers, 1964. 10619.
Neibaur, James L., and Ted Okuda. The Jerry Lewis Films: An Analytical Filmography of the Innovative Comic. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co., 1995.
OBrien, Geoffrey. Dream Time: Chapters from the Sixties. New York: Viking,
1988.
Oudart, Jean-Pierre. Cinema and Suture. Trans. Kari Hanet. In Cahiers du
cinma, 19691972: The Politics of Representation. Ed. Nick Browne. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. 4557.
Partridge, Eric. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English.
New York: Greenwich House, 1983.
Polan, Dana. Being and Nuttiness: Jerry Lewis and the French. Journal of
Popular Film 12.1 (Spring 1984): 4246.
. Working Hard Hardly Working: Labor and Leisure in the Films of
148
| Bibliography
9/11/09 11:14:42 AM
Jerry Lewis. In Enfant Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film. Ed. Murray
Pomerance. New York: New York University Press, 2002. 21123.
Pomerance, Murray, ed. Enfant Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film. New
York: New York University Press, 2002.
. The Errant Boy. In Enfant Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film. Ed.
Murray Pomerance. New York: New York University Press, 2002. 23955.
Recasens, Grard. Jerry Lewis. Cinma daujourdhui no. 59. Paris: Editions
Seghers, 1970.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995.
Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 19291968.
New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968.
Simsolo, Nol. Le monde de Jerry Lewis. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1969.
Tosches, Nick. Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams. New York:
Doubleday, 1992.
Bibliography
149
9/11/09 11:14:42 AM
9/11/09 11:14:42 AM
Index
actors, direction of, 102, 11215, 126

Adams, Stanley, 55
Adler, Jay, 67, 115
Adrian, Iris, 80, 112
ambiguity, 31, 4446, 48, 76, 91
America, 7576, 98
American in Paris, An (Minnelli film),
119
Anderson, Judith, 105
Arizona Dream (Kusturica film), 9
Arnold, Edward, 11314
Artists and Models (Tashlin film), 4
Atkins, Felicia, 55
authority, 6264, 83, 84. See also disruption; ideology
automotive culture, 76
Balin, Ina, 19, 43, 79, 107, 112
Ballard, Kaye, 68
Barnett, Vince, 77, 115
Basie, Count, 64, 96, 106
Bava, Mario, 12
Bay, Susan, 12
Bellboy, The, 45, 50, 76, 99, 117; blackand-white in, 5, 71, 72; characterizations and performances in, 19, 24, 28,
37; and Cracking Up, 22, 23; duration
and repetition in, 86, 87, 88, 90; fantasy
and escape in, 44, 75, 76; formalism
and materialism in, 14, 17, 8788, 122;
Jerry Lewis as character in, 26, 36,
64, 7980, 110; language in, 61, 6465,
66, 107; mise-en-scne of, 72, 73, 74
75, 7980, 90; music in, 96; photogra-
phy in, 77; production of, 45, 11415;

prologue of, 5, 78; self-referentiality in,
21, 22; silence in, 52, 6263, 64, 93, 97;
sound in, 94; subversion of orders in,
58, 5960; unconventionality of, 45,
16; women in, 5455, 89, 90; work in,
28, 5657, 61
Benayoun, Robert, 6, 53, 54, 91, 129
Ben Casey (TV series), 48
Benny, Jack, 116
Bergson, Henri, 93
Berle, Milton, 17, 22, 78
Best, James, 24, 36
Best Years of Our Lives, The (Wyler film),
126
Big Mouth, The, 7, 15, 38, 66, 99; authority figures in, 62, 83; characterization
of Clamson in, 20, 2526, 27, 28, 49;
comedians in, 21; communication in,
1213, 59, 63, 76; composition in, 81,
83; and death, 29; delay and duration
in, 87, 8889; fantasy in, 7576; as film
of protest, 4950; flight in, 14, 5051;
looks at the camera in, 41, 42; music in,
96; order-words in, 58, 60; reactions to
Lewis character in, 22, 40, 44; revenge
in, 84; sentimentality in, 45, 49; voices
in, 92, 97
black-and-white, 5, 7172
Blanchot, Maurice, 15, 97, 98
blocks: characters as, 18, 20, 30, 63, 83;
episodes as, 10, 1518, 19, 75, 88; and
order-words, 5859; and set design,
1516. See also obstruction
9/11/09 11:14:42 AM
Blues in Hosss Flat (Count Basie record), 64, 73, 96

body, 17, 20, 37, 107; and composition,
83. See also identity
Boeing Boeing (Rich film), 6, 8, 54
Bold Ones, The (TV series), 48
Bolero (Ruggles film), 117
Bonjour Monsieur Lewis (Benayoun
book), 6
Boy, 9, 79
Broadway Rhythm (Del Ruth film), 119
Brooks, Mel, 121
Bukatman, Scott, 36, 96
Burlesque on Carmen (Chaplin film), 51
Butterworth, Donna, 6
Cabot, Sebastian, 18
Caddy, The (Taurog film), 19, 21
Cahiers du cinma, 6
Callas, Charlie, 21, 40
camera movement, 1034, 105, 106; in
The Bellboy, 89; in Boy, 79; in The
Errand Boy, 7374, 76, 7879; in The
Ladies Man, 16, 68, 73, 78, 84; in The
Nutty Professor, 16, 40, 42, 68, 78; in
The Patsy, 24, 83, 85; in Three on a
Couch, 46, 8182
Caprice (Tashlin film), 54
Captains Courageous (Fleming film), 118
Carmel, Roger C., 13
Carradine, John, 112
cartoon, 60, 1056
Cassavetes, John, 9, 24, 40
Chaplin, Charles, 15, 19, 20, 33; pathos
and seriousness in, 51, 107, 108, 109
childhood, 48, 49, 121
Cinderfella (Tashlin film), 4, 22, 52, 68,
119; ballroom scene, 31, 9596, 1067;
Maximilian as unresponsive partner in,
34, 37, 38; Tashlins direction of, 1056
cinema: apparatus and technology of, 3,
30, 9192, 103; as cultural institution
and industry, 89, 59, 69, 71, 119; and
dubbing, in The Errand Boy, 4546,
92; video assist, 75. See also lens
Clayton, Bob, 24, 59
clown: in The Day the Clown Cried, 8,
14; in The Errand Boy, 44; in The Fam-
152
ily Jewels, 29, 51; in Hardly Working,

13, 14, 22, 29, 33; as mask, 110, 128
coherence, 15, 16, 3435, 96, 120
Colgate Comedy Hour (TV show), 3536
color, 7072, 76, 118, 119
Columbia Pictures, 7
comedy: comic traditions, 1, 10, 64, 84,
97; gag construction, 17, 8687, 91;
and humor or lack of humor, 51, 76;
and serious drama, 2627, 4849,
5153, 10811, 129; and therapy, 57
Comment vont les enfants? (omnibus
film), 9
communication: failure of, 4142, 5960,
63, 76; and performance, 30; as theme,
1213, 6162. See also nonsense;
speech; unresponsive partner
Comolli, Jean-Louis, 28
composition, 16, 42, 7785, 11718; and
aspect ratio, 99n6; and time, 90
Conreid, Hans, 39
costume, 68, 70, 79, 89, 90
counterpoint, 12425
Cracking Up, 9, 78, 88, 99, 133n1;
authority figures in, 62; characterization in, 27, 28; and death, 29; ending
of, 15, 2324, 36, 55, 56; episodic
structure of, 1314, 77; flight in, 14,
34; music in, 96; order-words in, 58;
parody of sentimentality in, 4748;
self-referentiality of, 2223; space in,
23, 72, 75, 93; therapy in, 13; unconventionality of, 16; Warren as misfit in,
9, 13, 23, 42, 49
Crosby and Hope, 50
Cure, The (Chaplin film), 76
Curtis, Tony, 6, 54
cutting, 17, 68, 83, 86, 122. See also reverse shot
Daney, Serge, 16
Davis, Sammy, Jr., 8, 9, 47
Day the Clown Cried, The (unreleased
film), 8, 14, 37
Dean and Me (Lewis and Kaplan book),
1, 51
death, 29, 4849, 69, 72
delay, 37, 8691
Index
9/11/09 11:14:43 AM
Deleuze, Gilles, 26, 28, 61, 99n5

Delicate Delinquent, The (McGuire film),
4, 5, 52, 96
desire, 68, 8990
DeVol, Frank, 12
disaster, 14, 8485. See also disruption
discontinuity, 18, 19, 2829, 9799; and
genre, 51; and reverse shot, 39. See
also disruption; fragmentation; gaps
Disorderly Orderly, The (Tashlin film), 6,
22, 41, 52; mummy gag in, 34; receptivity of Lewis character in, 28; revenge
and disaster in, 84, 85; Tashlins direction of, 106, 107
disruption, 14, 3435, 59, 67, 8485; of
naturalism, 44; of plot, 10. See also
discontinuity
Donlevy, Brian, 31
Donner, Richard, 8
Dont Give Up the Ship (Taurog film),
4, 5
Dont Make Waves (Mackendrick film), 54
Dont Raise the Bridge, Lower the River
(Paris film), 7, 8
doubles. See duality
Douglas, Gordon, 7
Dream Time (OBrien book), 54
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Mamoulian
film), 12829
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson
novel), 6
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to
Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(Kubrick film), 121
duality, 12, 3436, 110. See also reverse
shot
dummies, 14, 34, 43, 57
duration, 12, 39, 8691, 95, 111
Durgnat, Raymond, 88
Durocher, Leo, 47, 78
Edelman, Herb, 13
editing. See cutting
Edwards, Blake, 121
Edwards, Vincent, 48
episodic construction, 1018, 19. See also
blocks
Errand Boy, The, 37, 76, 99, 108; black-
and-white in, 5, 71, 72; boardroom

scene, 2829, 6364, 66, 7374, 96;
camera movement in, 7374, 76,
7879; chaos in, 84, 85; characterization of Morty in, 20, 28, 33, 4647;
composition in, 78, 79, 8081, 82, 85;
dubbing in, 4546, 92, 123; ending of,
20, 26, 36, 56; filmmaking in, 3, 47, 59,
71, 119; language and speech in, 59,
6061, 62, 6566, 9697; Magnolia in,
11, 44, 51, 55, 107; music in, 64, 68,
96; narrative of, 5, 11, 14, 16; orders
in, 5859; performance in, 24, 30, 31;
recalled in later films, 22, 23; reverse
field in, 39, 43; self-referentiality in,
21, 98; sentimentality and seriousness
in, 4647, 48, 49, 110; seriality in, 89;
silence in, 6364; sound in, 92, 93, 94,
95; space in, 67, 7374, 75, 78; suits of
armor in, 34, 43, 86; swimming-pool
scene, 73, 86, 90; women in, 55; work
in, 3132, 57
escape, 14, 50, 55, 75, 82; cinema as,
69,71
excess, 82, 85
exposition, 105, 108, 118, 125, 129
Faces (Cassavetes film), 9
family, 45, 46, 5557
Family Jewels, The, 6, 16, 25, 36, 76;
camera lens in, 42, 43, 121; composition in, 83; and Cracking Up, 23; and
death, 29; delay in, 86; disruption
of plot in, 10; episodic structure of,
1112, 18; home in, 56; language in,
58, 63, 97; multiplicity in, 28, 90, 98;
parade march in, 10, 11fig2, 15, 84;
photography in, 77; sentimentality in,
33, 47, 48; and Singin in the Rain, 92;
sound in, 91, 92, 94; space in, 67, 72,
73, 75, 119; This Diamond Ring in,
46, 120; Uncle Everett in, 26, 29, 48,
51, 72
fantasy, 21, 31, 44, 50, 7576; and cinema, 71; and music, 9596; and space,
68; in The Patsy, 9091
Feld, Fritz, 19
flight. See escape
Index
153
9/11/09 11:14:43 AM
Fontainebleau Hotel, 4, 64, 75

42nd Street (Bacon and Berkeley film),
119
Foster, Dianne, 48
fourth wall, 16, 74, 117, 118, 123
fragmentation, 15; of identity, 28, 70, 96,
9799. See also discontinuity
France-Observateur, 6
Franken, Steve, 13, 21, 59
Freeman, Kathleen, 10, 67, 92, 113, 124
friendship, 3637
gaps, 16, 68. See also discontinuity
Geisha Boy, The (Tashlin film), 4
Gerry, Alex, 19
Gielgud, John, 110
Godard, Jean-Luc, 49
Guattari, Flix, 26, 61, 99n5
Hamilton, Neil, 25, 112
Hardly Working, 9, 49, 50, 51, 55; alternate versions of, 99n2; ambiguity of,
13; children in, 48; clown figure in, 13,
14, 22, 29, 33; documentary nature of,
76; gag construction in, 86, 87; home
in, 56; language in, 60, 62, 64; music in,
96; rejection in, 58; reverse shot in, 43;
self-referentiality of, 22, 23; space in,
67, 75, 81, 8384; voice in, 28; work in,
18, 32, 33
Harris, Phil, 30, 112
Hawks, Howard, 76
Hayes, Rita, 45
Healey, Myron, 58
Henteloff, Alex, 13
Hollywood or Bust (Tashlin film), 4, 21,
34, 35, 105
home, 46, 5557, 69
Hook, Line, and Sinker (Marshall film),
7, 36, 37
Hope, Bob, 5051
Hopper, Hedda, 30, 31, 127
Hound of the Baskervilles, The (Doyle
novel), 37
Howard, Cy, 3
How Are the Kids? (omnibus film), 9
humor. See comedy
154
Husbands (Cassavetes film), 9

Hutton, Robert, 105
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (LeRoy film), 129
identity, 2, 1833, 37, 9899; and comic
performer, 109; and language, 66; and
space, 68. See also fragmentation
ideology, 2, 6667, 75, 84
In Dreams They Run, 48, 55, 74
Its Only Money (Tashlin film), 5, 6, 63,
124
Ivers, Robert, 30
James, Harry, 18, 68, 92, 95, 96
Jerry Lewis (Leutrat and Simonci book), 6
Jerry Lewis (Recacens book), 6
Jerry Lewis Just Sings (LP), 96
Jerry Lewis Show (TV show), 99n3
Jewishness, 64
Jolson, Al, 96
Kantor, Igo, 9
Kaplan, James, 1
Kelley, W. Wallace, 99n6
Kennedy, Edgar, 87
Kiel, Richard, 83
King, Stephen, 130
King of Comedy, The (Scorsese film), 9
Kiss Me Stupid (Wilder film), 54
Kruschen, Jack, 5
Krutnik, Frank, 2, 35
Kubrick, Stanley, 121
Kusturica, Emir, 9
Ladies Man, The, 28, 49, 50, 113, 119;
boarding-house set, 5, 16, 68, 74,
99n6; camera movement in, 16, 68,
73, 78, 84; color and black-and-white
in, 7172; composition in, 80, 81, 83,
84, 117; counterpoint in, 1718, 124;
delay and duration in, 86, 87, 88, 90;
hat scene, 84, 87, 88, 11516; home in,
56, 57; identity and performance in, 19,
24, 74; looks and vision in, 41, 42; mediatization in, 74; Miss Cartilage scene,
10, 18, 44, 6869, 74; multiplicity in,
Index
9/11/09 11:14:43 AM
15, 29, 55, 89; music in, 96; narrative

in, 1011; orders in, 60; George Raft
in, 24, 74, 88, 11617; rejection in, 58;
repetition in, 61; self-commentary in,
37; sentimentality and seriousness in,
45, 46, 47, 107, 110; silence in, 9495,
12223; sound in, 86, 92, 94, 95, 122
23; space in, 74, 75, 77; Pat Stanley in,
112, 120; therapy in, 1011, 52; women
in, 10, 55; work in, 31
Lang, Fritz, 79
language. See speech
Laurel, Stan, 44, 90, 97, 102, 117
Laurel and Hardy, 41, 87, 102
Lawford, Peter, 8, 9, 36
Lean, David, 118, 121
Leigh, Janet, 7, 46, 52
lens (of camera), 4243, 78, 94, 103, 121
Lester, Buddy, 40, 82, 84; in The Ladies
Man, 17, 87, 11516, 124
Leutrat, Jean-Louis, 6
Lewis, Danny (Jerry Lewiss father), 96,
116
Lewis, Gary, 46, 93, 120
Lewis, Jerry: amateur films of, 3; as codirector of Martin and Lewis films,
3, 1036; and France, 67; inactivity
as filmmaker, 89; narrative style and
concerns of, 7, 1013; reception of
work of, 6, 89, 22; record act of, 2, 21,
96; screenwriting of, 108, 116, 12426,
128, 12930; self-referentiality in films
of, 2123, 29, 98. See also Martin and
Lewis
Lewis, Ronald, 131
Lewis, Sylvia, 10
lighting, 45, 70, 74, 78, 132
Limelight (Chaplin film), 109
Little Caesar (LeRoy film), 129
Little Fun to Match the Sorrow, A,
48, 49
Living It Up (Taurog film), 3, 36, 103,
104, 114
look at the camera, 4042
Lord Love a Duck (Axelrod film), 54
Lorre, Peter, 112
Lund, Deanna, 48
Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 102, 121

March, Fredric, 128
Marshall, George, 4, 101, 102; and Hook,
Line, and Sinker, 7, 36; and Money
from Home, 3, 104
Martin, Dean, 3438, 130. See also Martin and Lewis
Martin and Lewis, 57, 96; breakup of, 1,
4, 129; in films, 24, 1819, 3637, 51,
1034; in nightclub performances, 1,
3435
Marx, Karl, 56
masculinity, 2, 24; and father figures,
5556; in Three on a Couch, 18, 26,
5354
mass media, 2, 30, 74, 77
Mayehoff, Eddie, 19
Mazurki, Mike, 115
McGuire, Don, 4
McNamara, James J., 9
McNear, Howard, 24, 112
Menninger, Karl, 57
metamorphosis, 4, 31, 38, 129; in The
Nutty Professor, 51, 69, 70
Miller, Sidney, 8
mise-en-scne. See camera movement;
color; composition; costume; lighting;
set design; space
Mobley, Mary Ann, 81
modernity, 15, 76
Modern Times (Chaplin film), 33
Monde de Jerry Lewis, Le (Simsolo
book), 6
money, 3233
Money from Home (Marshall film), 3,
104
Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin film), 109
Moore, Del, 15, 37, 124
Morris, Howard, 26
multiplicity, 2, 11, 15, 2829, 98; and
desire, 8990; of women, 55. See also
fragmentation
Murray, Jan, 21, 51
Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon, 9, 47
music, 46, 68, 9293, 94; in Cinderfella,
107; in The Errand Boy, 64, 68, 96; and
Index
155
9/11/09 11:14:44 AM
fantasy, 96; in The Patsy, 76, 79, 96. See

also singing
My Friend Irma (Marshall film), 3, 102
narrative. See plot
naturalism, 51, 68, 85, 98; and dialogue,
67; and The Errand Boy, 107; and fantasy, 44; and The Ladies Man, 46, 115;
and lighting, 74; and music, 64; and
psychology, 20, 87; and sound, 94. See
also verisimilitude
Nicholson, Jack, 10910
nonsense, 63, 93
North, Sheree, 103
Novelites, The, 21
Nutty Professor, The, 56, 50, 54, 84, 99;
address to audience in, 44, 98, 107;
attitudes toward Buddy Love in, 14,
48, 52, 13133; camera movement in,
16, 40, 42, 68, 78; characterization in,
20, 13133; color in, 70, 71, 72; composition in, 79, 82, 83; counterpoint
in, 110, 124; delay in, 87; desire in, 89;
home and family in, 55, 56; identity in,
26, 27, 33, 36, 13132; insecurity in,
29, 49, 53; inspiration for and writing
of, 12830; language in, 61, 97; lighting
in, 70, 74; looks and vision in, 40, 41,
42, 45, 121; masculinity in, 32; music
in, 96; received as attack on Dean Martin, 13031; receptivity of Kelp in, 28;
sound in, 92, 94, 95; space in, 67, 68,
6970; therapy in, 52, 57; transformation scene, 51; unresponsive partner
in, 37
OBrien, Geoffrey, 54
obstruction, 7885
Oedipus complex, 5556. See also family
Oliver, Susan, 33
Olivier, Laurence, 110
One More Time, 8, 9, 21, 45, 51; color
in, 72; duration in, 88; friendship in,
3637; multiplicity in, 90; reverse field
in, 43; space in, 70, 78
order-words, 5861, 99n5
Oudart, Jean-Pierre, 39
156
Pack Up Your Troubles (Marshall film), 102

Paramount Pictures, 27, 75, 105, 124
Paris, Jerry, 7
Parrish, Leslie, 27
Partridge, Eric, 15
pathos, 47, 5152
Patsy, The, 3, 6, 52, 54, 99; camera movement in, 24, 83, 85; chaos and order in,
85; color in, 70, 72; composition in, 79,
83; Copa Caf scene, 12, 39, 66, 9091,
95; death in, 29; direction of actors
in, 112; duration in, 12, 87, 9091; Ed
Sullivan Show scene, 21, 3031, 43,
70, 85; ending of, 36, 4344, 85; family
in, 57; identity in, 19, 24, 26; language
in, 37, 58, 61, 66; look at the camera
in, 40, 41; music in, 76, 79, 96; narrative of, 14, 16; performance in, 3031,
90, 127; pop culture in, 76; restaurant
scene, 3233; self-referentiality in,
2122, 44, 98; sentimentality and seriousness in, 45, 49, 51, 1078, 110;
singing-lesson scene, 39, 87, 9394,
111; sound, 92, 9394, 95; space in, 67,
69, 70, 72, 74; unresponsive partner in,
37, 38; voice in, 97
Peckinpah, Sam, 121
performance, 1833, 52, 7475, 90,
12628. See also actors
Pevney, Joseph, 51
phonograph, 9293, 95
photography, 77
Pink Panther, The (Edwards film), 54
Pitnick, SanDee, 43, 126
plot, disruption or absence of, 45, 10
13, 16, 18, 91; as pretext, 11, 50
point of view, 4243, 81. See also composition
Polan, Dana, 31
Pomerance, Murray, 97
Positif, 6
power, 6264, 83, 84. See also disruption;
ideology
psychoanalysis, 39, 55, 57. See also
therapy
Public Enemy, The (Wellman film), 129
Pully, B. S., 66
Index
9/11/09 11:14:44 AM
Raft, George, 24, 74, 83, 88, 96, 115,

116, 117
Rambo, Dack, 83
Recacens, Grard, 6
receptivity, 28; See also unresponsive
partner
recording technology, 9192. See also
cinema
rejection, 14, 31, 37, 58
repetition, 61, 88, 89, 9697
revenge, 3, 25, 77, 84, 86; in Tashlin, 85
reverse shot, 37, 3840, 4344, 66
Rich, John, 6
Richmond, Bill, 44, 67, 119
Riley, Jeannine, 38
Rock-a-Bye Baby (Tashlin film), 4, 96,
106
Rosenbloom, Maxie, 66
Ross, Joe E., 66
Rowe, Vern, 40
Rubin, Benny, 39, 115
Ruman, Sig, 80
Sad Sack, The (Marshall film), 4, 5
Salinger, J. D., 108
Salt and Pepper (Donner film), 8
Sanders, Colonel Harland, 75, 84
Sarris, Andrew, 35, 47
Scharf, Walter, 46
Scorsese, Martin, 9, 126
Scott, George C., 110
Sea World, 41, 50, 76, 88
Sei donne per lassassino (Bava film), 12
sentimentality, 33, 4549, 107. See also
pathos
seriality, 8990. See also multiplicity;
repetition
set design, 1516, 70, 72, 7475, 119. See
also space
sexuality, 5455, 68; See also masculinity;
women
Shadows (Cassavetes film), 9
Shot in the Dark, A (Edwards film), 54
show business, 30, 4748, 9899; as therapy, 57. See also cinema; performance
silence, 37, 38, 39, 52, 87; in The Bellboy,
6263, 64, 93, 97; in The Errand Boy,
6364; in The Ladies Man, 9495,

12223
Silva, Henry, 34, 105
Simonci, Paul, 6
Simsolo, Nol, 6
singing: in The Errand Boy, 45, 92; by
Lewis, 96; by Dean Martin, 3435;
in The Nutty Professor, 74, 96; in The
Patsy, 92. See also music; Lewis, Jerry:
record act of
Singin in the Rain (Donen and Kelly
film), 71, 92
Skelton, Red, 110
Sloane, Everett, 58, 84, 112
Smorgasbord. See Cracking Up
sound, 79, 86, 9197, 12224
space, 2324, 6778; as frame, 82; and
home, 5657. See also composition; set
design
speech, 1920, 39, 5867, 9193, 124;
as direct address to audience, 4445,
1078; and Oedipus complex, 56; as
self-commentary, 3738
Stanley, Pat, 11, 110, 112, 120
Stevens, Stella, 27, 132, 133
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 129
Stone, Harold J., 13, 22
Stone, Leonard, 38
Stooge, The (Taurog film), 51
Strauss, Robert, 12
structure, foregrounding of, 1617, 18,
8788
Swinger, The (Sidney film), 54
Tashlin, Frank, 6, 54, 63, 76; and color,
118; direction of Cinderfella, 1057; and
disaster, 85; as mentor to Lewis, 4, 101,
105, 106. See also Cinderfella; Hollywood or Bust; The Disorderly Orderly
Taurog, Norman, 4, 19, 35, 51, 84; character and technical knowledge of, 101,
103, 104
Tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse, Die
(Lang film), 79
Taylor, Sam, 7, 128
telethon. See Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon
Index
157
9/11/09 11:14:44 AM
Thats My Boy (Walker film), 3, 19, 51, 52

Their First Mistake (Marshall film), 102
therapy: and cinema, 71; and comedy,
57; in Cracking Up, 13; and disaster,
84; in The Ladies Man, 1011, 52; in
The Nutty Professor, 52, 57; and pop
psychology, 38, 6566; in Three on a
Couch, 12, 5254. See also psychoanalysis
This Diamond Ring (Gary Lewis song),
46, 93, 120
Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, The (Lang
film), 79
Three on a Couch, 12, 16, 29, 50, 58;
James Best in, 24, 36; camera movement in, 46, 8182; color in, 71, 72,
119; confession in, 44; dance scene in,
18, 46, 8182; as departure for Lewis, 7, 26, 48, 49, 54; friendship in, 36;
impersonations in, 18, 2627, 28, 32,
97; language in, 20, 63, 124; mise-enscne of, 8182, 8485; money in, 33;
multiplicity in, 55, 89, 90; music in,
96; space in, 70, 7273, 75; therapy
in, 5254; women in, 53, 55; writing
of, 128
Three-Ring Circus (Pevney film), 51
Three Stooges, The, 111
time, 8691. See also duration
Too Late Blues (Cassavetes film), 9
Total Film-Maker, The (Lewis book), 17,
78, 98
Towed in a Hole (Marshall film), 102
Tracy, Spencer, 118
transformation. See metamorphosis
Traubel, Helen, 24, 112
Twentieth CenturyFox, 7
United Artists, 8
United States, 7576, 98
unresponsive partner, 3435, 37, 88, 90.
See also receptivity
Vacances de M. Hulot, Les (Tati film), 76
van Voorhis, Westbrook, 71, 77
verisimilitude, 16, 91. See also naturalism
158
Vidal, Gore, 4
video assist, 75
Visit to a Small Planet (Taurog film), 4, 5
voice. See speech
Wachsberger, Nat, 8
Walker, Hal, 3
Wallis, Hal, 4, 6
Walston, Ray, 84
Warhol, Andy, 76
Warner Bros., 8, 9
Way ... Way Out (Douglas film), 7, 8
Weaver, Doodles, 86
Whats New Pussycat? (Donner film), 54
Which Way to the Front? 8, 14, 21, 45,
48; as anti-sentimental, 46, 49; authority figure in, 62, 83; composition in, 81,
83; delay in, 87; flight in, 14; humor
in, 51; independence from plot of, 16;
Jewishness in, 64; language in, 56, 59,
61, 63, 64, 65; lighting in, 74; money in,
33, 49; music in, 96; Oedipal scenario
of, 55, 56, 57; performance in, 18, 28,
31; phonograph in, 93; rejection theme
in, 14, 31, 37, 58; self-insight in, 38;
self-referentiality in, 22; space in, 68,
77; voice in, 97
Whos Minding the Store? (Tashlin film),
6, 2122, 84, 85, 107
Wilder, Billy, 121
Winchell, Walter, 75
women, 10, 53, 5455, 68, 8990
Wood, John, 65
work, 18, 5657, 61; and identity, 28,
3133
World of Henry Orient, The (Hill film), 54
Wuthering Heights (Wyler film), 129
Wyler, William, 121, 126
Wynn, Ed, 119
Wynn, Keenan, 66, 112
Youre Never Too Young (Taurog film),
35, 84
Zinnemann, Fred, 118, 121
zoom, 77, 7879
Index
9/11/09 11:14:44 AM
Chris Fujiwara is the author of The World
and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger

and Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall.
He has edited several books, including Defining M
oments
in Movies. He has contributed articles on film to
numerous anthologies and periodicals and is the editor of
Undercurrent (www.fipresci.org/undercurrent), the online
film-criticism magazine of the international film critics
association FIPRESCI. He has taught and lectured on
film history and aesthetics at Tokyo University,
the Athne Franais Cultural Center in Tokyo,
Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design,
Emerson College, and Temple University.
9/11/09 11:14:45 AM
9/11/09 11:14:45 AM
Books in the series Contemporary

Film Directors
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Darlene J. Sadlier
Jim Jarmusch
Juan Surez
Abbas Kiarostami
Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Roman Polanski
James Morrison
Joel and Ethan Coen

R. Barton Palmer
Claire Denis
Judith Mayne
Wong Kar-wai
Peter Brunette
Edward Yang
John Anderson
Pedro Almodvar
Marvin DLugo
Chris Marker
Nora Alter
Abel Ferrara
Nicole Brenez, translated by
Adrian Martin
Jane Campion
Kathleen McHugh
Manoel de Oliveira
John Randal Johnson
Neil Jordan
Maria Pramaggiore
Paul Schrader
George Kouvaros
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Elizabeth Ezra
Terrence Malick
Lloyd Michaels
Sally Potter
Catherine Fowler
Atom Egoyan
Emma Wilson
Albert Maysles
Joe McElhaney
Jerry Lewis
Chris Fujiwara
9/11/09 11:14:45 AM
The University of Illinois Press

is a founding member of the
Association of American University Presses.
Composed in 10/13 New Caledonia

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at the University of Illinois Press
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Chris Fujiwara - Jerry Lewis (Contemporary Film Directors)

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C O N T E M P O R A R Y

Contemporary Film Directors

The Contemporary Film Directors series provides concise,

A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.

Frontispiece: The Errand Boy

The Performance of Identity 18

How to Undo Things with Words 58

The Frame and Its Obstructions 78

The Total Filmmaker 97

An Interview with Jerry Lewis | 101

more resourceful, or more downtrodden than those around them. The

comedies, haunted-house comedies, Western spoofs, and so on. As

Figure 1. The introduction of the

from unthinking, conformist punditsgibes whose ideological nature

the originality of Lewiss directorial work. As a result, at a time when

Figure 2. The disorganized marchers

actresses; performer in a revue staged for a TV show; and even teacher

Jewels, after establishing a central questionWhich uncle will Donna

Warrens father, a French ancestor, another doctor whom Warren meets

Figure 3. The Bellboy: Jerry Lewis as

share the same space, as defined by Lewiss mise-en-scne; nothing

tional narratives that focus on their relationships with the characters

implies a consciousness of modes of speech that the character has not

Store? poster (just as in The Disorderly Orderly there appears an ad for

Figure 4. Bo (Jerry Lewis) faces an uncertain

Figure 5. Jerry Lewis and Del Moore

vehemence of Neil Hamiltons lawyer in The Family Jewels and the

than a set of possibilities or a collection of stereotypes (as in Cracking

Front?, Kesselring can be played by himself and by Byers. The role is

car-commercial sequence, which might have been more intelligible than

Figure 6. The tipping scene in The Patsy:

acutely embarrassing for everyone because it reveals the contradiction

stop playing. [A]nd Deanof course!never hesitated for a second.

television series, in which, as Scott Bukatman notes, Martin reveals an

theme of betrayalpresent in several Martin and Lewis filmsin the

direct gaze at the camera becomes the sign of failed communication:

tion that organizes images, or a metaphor for consciousness grasping

ending: the subject of this implicitly autobiographical film being still

scene, during a public preview, turns out to have been re-redubbed, as

in his native New Jersey, to go to Hollywood to be closer to the movies:

The Big Mouth is made up entirely of flight, of escape. Several great

Figure 7. Stella Stevens and Jerry Lewis

A critique of the therapeutic/normative role of male sexuality, Three

ing a salesmans role (whereas Buddy Love at least entertained people

Novak, denouncing Stanley at a union meeting of the bellboys, says,

How to Undo Things with Words

Figure 8. The steamer trunk in The Bellboy:

The concept/model wont talk inspires in Kelp a series of revisions,

silence, the entirety of Lewiss film is an extremely sophisticated utterance

tions to his underlings, to the accompaniment of Count Basies Blues

Figure 9. The hidden violence of speech:

around repetitions of that colloquialism. In Which Way to the Front?,

reasserts itself over the vertical, as Lewis opens a door in an apparent

Figure 10. The Ladies Man: Harry James,

of Chriss acceptance of the prize in Three on a Couch directly recalls

Figure 11. Jerry Lewis in The Bellboy.

Kentucky Fried Chicken fame as an irascible hotel guest. The intrusion

insistence on the essential properties of the image, those that constitute

Figure 12. Jerry Lewis in The Errand Boy.

Figure 13. Visual excess in Three on a Couch:

of Bo in a lawn chair reading a newspaper is angled so that, deep in the

already overloaded with elements and full of strain. The catastrophes

is the open revelation of structure itself, of the principle at work within

be said to move backward. At one point, Clamson is pulled over by a